Treatment of Involutional Osteoporosis Using Calcitonin and Bisphosphanates

This study concerns the evaluation of -thalassemia alleles in 20 individuals with homozygous -thalassemia major, using gene amplification and dot-blot hybridization with synthetic oligonucleotide probes.
In addition to the genetic and molecular screening, erythropoietic cells in the peripheral blood samples of the same patients (12 non-splenectomized and 8 splenectomized) were studied by transmission electron microscopy. The molecular lesions causing -thalassemia major have been delineated in Antalya (a Turkish city on the Mediterranean coast) by using polymerase chain reaction technique, which preferentially amplifies -globin DNA sequences containing the most frequent -thalassemia mutations in this region.
The Mediterranean population in Antalya carries six different -globin mutations; four of these had been cumulated into IVS-I domain of -globin gene, which account for nearly 95% of all abnormalities.
On the other hand, most of the erythroblastic cells showed many intracytoplasmic alterations corresponding to that of mutations of -thalassemia.