Abstract

Background: In the bid to decrease infant mortality, we introduced New-born screening for sickle cell disease with parental education and enrolment of the early diagnosed child into comprehensive care program at the Federal Medical Center, Asaba.
Methods: The institution’s ethical review Board approved the proposal. We systematically collected samples on dry blood spots from consecutively delivered babies after informed parental consent. We thereafter, shipped them to a regional laboratory where they were eluted and analysed on HPLC machine, Newborn Hb variant. Statistical analysis was by simple frequencies, means and standard deviations and chi square test. The level of significance was set at p< 0.05.
Results: Two thousand four hundred and fifty one babies were delivered over 1st March 2017 to 28th February 2019. One thousand and thirty three of the total 2451 (42.2%) were sampled and results for 983 samples were available for the analysis. Seven different haemoglobin patterns were identified in these newborns. They are HbAA, HbAS, HbAC, HbAD, HbSS, HbAE and HbDD; and HbAA being the most predominant with a frequency of 74.9%.The prevalence of HbSS was 0.8% and the DD was 0.2% and 24. 2% were traits.
There was a high level of awareness of the disease among the mothers as many of them had knowledge of their Hb Phenotype before marriage. Eight hundred and forty-four (844) 81.7% knew about phenotype test while 706 (68.3%) had prior knowledge of their Hb phenotype.
Conclusion: The low prevalence of HbSS in this survey might have resulted from the high level of parental awareness and also from the fact that only 42.2% of births were screened. This emphasises the role of societal education and awareness for decreasing the prevalence of the disease.