Background: The French national programme for the neonatal screening of sickle cell disease (SCD) was set up in 1995. This screening is targeted at newborn infants at risk. Over 5 years, 115,480 newborn infants were tested from 80 maternity departments from the northern part of the Paris area. 250 Patients with SCD were identified--that is, one in 462 newborn infants tested. Carriers for a haemoglobin (Hb) variant are frequent (5.34%). Some uncommon Hb variants were also identified, which gave rise to pitfalls to the testing when associated with HbS: HbKorle-Bu, HbHope, HbBougardirey-Mali, and HbLadésirade (4% of SS-like profiles).
Objective: An effective screening strategy was developed to avoid these false positive and false negative responses.
Methods: Isoelectric focusing (IEF), the method of primary screening, is rapid and inexpensive. Cation exchange high performance liquid chromatography (CE-HPLC), which is automated, fast, and quantitative was selected as a secondary method.
Results: IEF diagnosed normal profiles in 89% of the tested samples from newborn infants. CE-HPLC identified most of the common Hb variants by their retention time and the measure of HbA/HbS ratio, important for the differential diagnosis between an asymptomatic HbS carrier and an HbS/beta+thal compound heterozygote. Furthermore, the high sensitivity of the CE-HPLC detected as little as 0.5% of a Hb variant. This avoided false negatives in samples from premature or transfused newborn infants. All samples with SS-like profiles were confirmed with a second CE-HPLC with another programme. A combination of these three methods confirmed the status of 99.7% of the samples from the tested newborn infants. Some cases required a reverse phase-HPLC method (for gamma-globin or alpha-globin chain variants). Finally, some exceptional samples required confirmation by testing DNA extracted with Güthrie paper for a precise diagnosis.
Conclusions: This effective strategy combining several methods dramatically reduces the risk of errors. Many families are thus spared unnecessary worrying recalls. The only unavoidable cause of false positives remains the HbS/hereditary fetal Hb (HPFH).