University of Science and Technology of China, Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, Hefei, Anhui, China.
Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2017 Sep 5;7(1):10510. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-11144-w.
Anemia is a widespread public health problem with 1/4 ~1/3 of the world's population being affected. In Southeast Asia, Thalassemia trait (TT) and iron deficiency anemia (IDA) are the two most common anemia types and can have a serious impact on quality of life. IDA patients can be treated with iron supplementation, yet TT patients have diminished capacity to process iron. Therefore, distinguishing between types of anemia is essential for effective diagnosis and treatment. Here, we present two advances towards low-cost screening for anemia. First: a new red-cell-based index, Joint Indicator A, to discriminate between IDA, TT, and healthy children in a Chinese population. We collected retrospective data from 384 Chinese children and used discriminant function analysis to determine the best analytic function to separate healthy and diseased groups, achieving 94% sensitivity and 90% specificity, significantly higher than reported indices. This result is achieved using only three red cell parameters: mean cell volume (MCV), red cell distribution width (RDW) and mean cell hemoglobin concentration (MCHC). Our second advance: the development of a low cost, portable red cell analyzer to measure these parameters. Taken together, these two results may help pave the way for widespread screening for nutritional and genetic anemias.
贫血是一个广泛存在的公共卫生问题，全球有 1/4 到 1/3 的人口受到影响。在东南亚，地中海贫血（TT）和缺铁性贫血（IDA）是两种最常见的贫血类型，会严重影响生活质量。IDA 患者可以通过补铁治疗，而 TT 患者处理铁的能力下降。因此，区分不同类型的贫血对于有效诊断和治疗至关重要。在这里，我们提出了两种用于贫血低成本筛查的进展。首先，我们提出了一种新的基于红细胞的指数 Joint Indicator A，用于区分中国人群中的 IDA、TT 和健康儿童。我们收集了 384 名中国儿童的回顾性数据，并使用判别函数分析确定了最佳分析函数，以区分健康组和患病组，灵敏度为 94%，特异性为 90%，显著高于报道的指数。这一结果仅使用三个红细胞参数：平均红细胞体积（MCV）、红细胞分布宽度（RDW）和平均红细胞血红蛋白浓度（MCHC）即可实现。我们的第二个进展是开发了一种低成本、便携式的红细胞分析仪来测量这些参数。总之，这两个结果可能有助于为营养性和遗传性贫血的广泛筛查铺平道路。
