Prevalence of Kell Blood Group System in Blood Donors of Makkah City, Saudi Arabia.

BACKGROUND: The Kell blood group system has different types of antigens, which have immunogenic properties; therefore, it is considered as the third clinically significant blood group in blood transfusion. Patients that lack Kell antigen may produce antibodies that may cause transfusion reaction. This study is the first report on Kell antigen system distribution in blood donors in Makkah city which is important to improve transfusion services. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to determine the distribution of Kell antigens and phenotypes among blood donors in Makkah city, Saudi Arabia. METHODS: This is a retrospective study to determine the prevalence of Kell antigens among blood donors, who come to donate blood in Al Noor specialist hospital, Makkah city. The sample size was 150 donors with a minimum age of 18 years. RESULTS: The most common Kell antigens were k antigen (96%) and Kpb (98%), while the less common were K antigen (18.7%) and Kpa (3.3%). The two most common Kell phenotypes are Kp(a-b+) (95%) and K-k+ (79.3%), while the two least common Kell phenotypes are Kp(a-b-) (1.3%) and Kp(a+b-) (0.6%). CONCLUSIONS: This is the first study that set out to determine the prevalence of Kell antigens and phenotypes among blood donors in Makkah city. This study showed that there is a variation in Kell antigen and phenotype distribution. The Kell blood group system has an important impact on transfusion medicine.

A Cross-Sectional Study of Detection of Beta Globin (HBB) Haplotypes Among Beta Thalassemia Patients.

Introduction Beta-thalassemia is among the most common monogenic disorders in the Arabian Peninsula. This study aimed to investigate the ß-globin (HBB) haplotypes among ß-thalassemia patients in Saudi cohort which have potential implications in understanding the clinical care of patients and population genetic factors associated with ß-thalassemia. Methods We analyzed 60 ß-thalassemia patients. Male/female distribution for ß-thalassemia was 58.33%/41.66%. Results of hematological parameters and indices were obtained from the database. HBB haplotyping assay was performed for four specific loci of the HBB gene cluster using polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) technique. Results HBB haplotyping assay identified three novel patterns namely haplotype 1, haplotype 2, and haplotype 3 and three common African haplotypes including Benin, Senegal, and Cameron. The frequency of haplotype 1 was the highest among the studied samples (62%, n = 37) with 56.76% (n = 21) observed in males compared to 43.24% (n = 16) in females. This was followed by Senegal, haplotype 2, Benin and haplotype 3 with similar percentage, and Cameron haplotype with 18%, 12%, 3% and 2%, respectively. The relationship between these haplotypes and various hematological parameters was calculated and our study found no significant relationship (p-value >0.05). Conclusion Our study indicated the importance of finding out types of ß-globin haplotypes as novel types being discovered. Though no statistically significant association was identified among all the haplotypes in terms of hematological parameters, Cameroon or Benin haplotypes had the mildest form because they have the highest means among all parameters. Further studies need to be carried out on a larger population to detect the frequency of each specific mutation in each haplotype among ß-thalassemia patients. This would help to re-address the question of the origin(s) of the ß-thalassemia.