An Essay On Thalassemia In Children

There are many people in the world who carry a blood disorder and may not even know they carry the disease until they have children who have it. An estimated one in twenty people in Malaysia carry the disease known as thalassemia, and while there may only be 200,000 cases of thalassemia per year in the United States, the disease is much more prevalent in the Eastern side of the world. There are several types of thalassemia, and the disease is also known as Cooley’s anemia or Mediterranean anemia. The disease is autosomal recessive, meaning that if both parents are unknowing carriers of thalassemia, there is a one in four chance of their children having the disease. Patients who have thalassemia cannot produce the normal amount of hemoglobin, which results in anemia, and the …show more content…
The exact reasoning behind this is unknown, however, scientists assume that this is because those with the disease have extra protection against malaria, and the Eastern Mediterranean has a high level of malaria transmission. This is quite different from America, where up to three percent of the population has thalassemia, and only forty percent of the population may be a carrier. Throughout the entire world, five percent of the population has thalassemia, and the disease is inherited between males and females equally, as the pattern of inheritance for thalassemia is autosomal recessive. If both parents are carriers of thalassemia, there is a one in four chance of them having a child who has thalassemia, even though the parents do not have the disease. In patients with thalassemia, iron overload may affect the endocrine system, which creates difficulty in having children. Thalassemia makes menstrual cycles either erratic or not occur at all in women, and thalassemia makes pregnancy difficult for women. In men, thalassemia affects male reproductive hormones, which creates difficulty in having children for men as