%0 Journal Article
%T Insights into age- and sickle-cell-disease- interaction using principal components analysis
%A Mamta Sharma
%A Manju R Mamtani
%A Manik Amin
%A Tushar P Thakre
%A Smita Sharma
%A Amit Amin
%A Hemant Kulkarni
%J BMC Blood Disorders
%D 2006
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2326-6-3
%X In a cross-sectional study of 374 subjects with varying hemoglobin S (HbS) status, we characterized the interaction between age and sickle hemoglobin using principal components analysis.Factor analysis in subjects with hemoglobin AA identified three orthogonal factors ¨C normal erythropoiesis, presence of thalassemia and the aggregability potential of the blood. These three factors were differentially associated with hemoglobin status. Age influenced the association of factors #2 and #3 with hemoglobin status.Our findings suggest that the interaction between age and hemoglobin status needs to be considered in both clinical and public health settings.Sickle cell disease strongly influences the peripheral blood cell counts and red cell characteristics. Moreover, each of these parameters measured in the peripheral blood can be potentially instructive with regards the systemic alterations in sickle cell pathophysiology. However, since these peripheral blood indexes show complex correlations among each other [1,2] it is conceivable that they capture overlapping information about the disease process and pose difficulty for correctly interpreting the different and independent components that are affected in sickle cell pathology. One study [2] ¨C using data from 825 homozygous sickle cell subjects ¨C used principal components analysis and observed that the peripheral blood characteristics map on to three "factors" that represent hemolysis rate, presence of ¦Â-thalassemia and intra-erythrocytic hemoglobin polymerization. However, since this study used homozygous sickle cell subjects only, it did not permit an understanding of the extent to which the factors are altered in sickle cell anemia as compared to their normal configuration. Further, age is known to significantly affect the peripheral blood characteristics. Therefore, it becomes of practical as well as academic interest to explore if age differentially influences these factors.We conducted a cross-sectional study on 374
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2326/6/3