Prenatal diagnosis of α- and β-thalassemias in southern Thailand.

We report our work on prenatal diagnosis of α-thalassemia, β-thalassemia and other hemoglobinopathies in southern Thailand. DNA-based diagnosis was offered to 1906 pregnancies at risk for thalassemia using a combination method of multiplex-PCR and reverse dot blot analysis to detect seven α-globin and 47 β-globin mutations. The most commonly detected mutation of α-thalassemia was a South-East Asian deletion (98%), followed by a Thai deletion (2%).