Sickle cell disease in the Kurdish population of northern Iraq.

Epidemiological studies have revealed that sickle cell disease patients are clustered in two geographical areas in Iraq, one among the Arabs in the extreme south, another among the Kurdish population in the extreme north, where they constitute major health problems. However, no studies have focused on the genotypes responsible for sickle cell disease or the β-globin gene haplotypes associated with it. For the latter purpose, a total of 103 unrelated Kurdish sickle cell disease patients were evaluated by restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) for the sickle cell mutation, followed by multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and reverse hybridization for β- and α-thalassemia (β- and α-thal) mutations, whenever indicated.