Reticulocyte Hemoglobin as a Screening Test for Iron Deficiency Anemia: A New Cut-Off.

Introduction: Latent iron deficiency (LID), in which iron stores in the body are depleted without incidental anemia, poses a key diagnostic challenge. Reticulocyte hemoglobin content (Ret-Hb) is directly correlated with the functionally available iron for heme synthesis in erythroblasts. Consequently, Ret-Hb has been proposed as an efficient iron status marker.

A Wide Spectrum Study of α-Globin Chain Variants: Cases from the UK.

Over many years, cases of suspected α-globin chain variants were collected from different parts of the UK. The suspicion was based on the clinical picture, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) variant percentage, retention time (RT) and isoelectric focusing (IEF). DNA sequencing and the restriction enzyme EI were used for definitive diagnosis.