Hereditary hemochromatosis in north-eastern Romania

Hereditary hemochromatosis is a genetic disturbance of iron metabolism resulting in iron overload in several organs and their functional failure. Early diagnosis is necessary to start a simple and effective therapy: bleeding. It is the most frequent genetic disease in some populations. Our objectives were 1. An estimate of the expectancy of the disease in the population of our geographic region, and 2. To diagnose the disease by applying the established methods and estimate the efficiency of our diagnosis.

1.To estimate the expectancy, we genotyped 200 persons for the most frequent mutations causing the disease: HFE-C282Y and HFE-H63D by PCR-RFLP. 2. To diagnose the disease phenotypically we determined plasma iron level, ferritin level and transferrin saturation index in 549 patients previously diagnosed as chronic hepatitis or cirrhosis and genotyped those with hemochromatosis phenotype.

1. We found allelic frequencies of 1.75% and 13.25% for the HFE-C282Y and H63D mutant alleles respectively. From these frequencies we calculated that a severe case caused by a C282Y/C282Y homozygote can arise in 816 people and a mild case caused by a C282Y/H63D compound heterozygote can arise in 100 people 2. Among 549 patients we found 10 to have the phenotype of hemochromatosis and 3 out of the 10 were found to carry mutations: two in the HFE gene (one homozygous C282Y and one compound heterozygous C282Y/H63D) and one in the hemojuvelin (HJV) gene (a G320V).