[Clinical Significance of Screening Thalassemia with High- Throughput Sequencing]

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate the diagnostic value of high-throughput sequencing (NGS) in screening the thalassemia genes.

Methods: The peripheral blood of 2 858 cases of pre-pregnancy and pregnancy from October 2014 to October 2016 randomly were collected in department of obstetrics, the third people's hospital in Dongguan city. Peripheral blood was used for the blood routine examination, hemoglobin electrophoresis, traditional thalassaemia gene screening and NGS.

Results: The rate of missed diagnosis for α-thalassemia and β-thalassemia using NGS was 0.87% and 1.59%, respectively. Meanwhile, the missed rate of screening for α-thalassemia and β-thalassemia by traditional screening models was 26.77% and 2.38%, respectively. The area under the ROC curve of α-thalassemia and β-thalassemia screened by NGS was 0.994 and 0.991, respectively, however, the area under the ROC curve of screening for α-thalassemia and β-thalassemia by the traditional screening model was 0.866 and 0.988, respectively. The sensitivity, rate of missed diagnosis, Youden index and negative predictive value of screening for α-thalassemia and β-thalassemia using NGS all were superior to those using traditional screening.

Conclusion: Compared with the traditional screening model, the NGS screening for thalassemia genes shows a high accuracy, moreover can avoid missed diagnosis resulted from screening by conventional method, suggesting that the NCS possesses the accurate and diagnostic value for screening of thalassemia and can widely apply to clinical practise so as to provid the guarantee for early diagnosis of thalassemia.