Thermogravimetric analysis coupled with chemometrics as a powerful predictive tool for β-thalassemia screening

beta-Thalassemia is a hemoglobin genetic disorder characterized by the absence or reduced beta-globin chain synthesis, one of the constituents of the adult hemoglobin tetramer. In this study the possibility of using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) followed by chemometrics as a new approach for beta-thalassemia detection is proposed. Blood samples from patients with beta-thalassemia were analyzed by the TG7 thermobalance and the resulting curves were compared to those typical of healthy individuals. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to evaluate the correlation between the hematological parameters and the thermogravimetric results. The thermogravimetric profiles of blood samples from beta-thalassemia patients were clearly distinct from those of healthy individuals as result of the different quantities of water content and corpuscular fraction. The hematological overview showed significant decreases in the values of red blood cell indices and an increase in red cell distribution width value in thalassemia subjects when compared with those of healthy subjects. The implementation of a predictive model based on Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) for beta-thalassemia diagnosis, was performed and validated. This model permitted the discrimination of anemic patients and healthy individuals and was able to detect thalassemia in clinically heterogeneous patients as in the presence of delta beta-thalassemia and beta-thalassemia combined with Hb Lepore. TGA and Chemometrics are capable of predicting beta-thalassemia syndromes using only a few microliters of blood without any pretreatment and with an hour of analysis time. A fast, rapid and cost-effective diagnostic tool for the beta-thalassemia screening is proposed. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.