Can HbE trait in my wife affect unborn child's health?

Question

Hello doctor,

My wife is nine weeks pregnant with our first child. We got are hemoglobin results back today. My wife's test results were positive. EA, HbE trait with or without thalassemia. I would like to know if child's health could be a concern?

Please help. Her grandmother has diabetes. Got it at an old age.

Answer 1

Hello,

Welcome to icliniq.com.

HbE trait will not pose any health problems to your child if he or she inherits it. Only the size of the red blood cells will be smaller than normal. The only worrying aspect is the fact that your wife might have the alpha thalassemia gene, which might affect your baby. The inheritance of alpha-thalassemia is complex because the condition involves two genes: HbA1 and HbA2. People have two copies of the HbA1 gene and two copies of the HbA2 gene in each cell. Each copy is called an allele. Therefore, there are four alleles that produce alpha-globin, the protein that results from these genes. For each of the two genes, one allele is inherited from a person's father, and the other is inherited from a person's mother. So each person inherits two alleles from each parent. The different types of alpha-thalassemia result from the loss of some or all of these alleles.

I would suggest that you both get yourselves tested for the genes involved in alpha thalassemia. If both of you are carriers, your child should also be tested either through chorionic villus sampling or amniocentesis.