A benign form of thalassaemia intermedia may be determined by the interaction of triplicated alpha locus and heterozygous beta-thalassaemia.
In this paper we report that the combination of a triplicated alpha globin locus with heterozygous beta-thalassaemia produces a clinical phenotype of thalassaemia intermedia in five Italian subjects from four unrelated families, while in two other cases the phenotype was thalassaemia minor. The haematological findings of the five patients were uniform, producing a benign form of thalassaemia intermedia, transfusion independent, with a long life expectancy. The pattern of inheritance of the two genetic determinants and the more pronounced beta/alpha globin chain imbalance, demonstrates that the genetic combination is indeed the cause of the phenotype. The pattern of restriction enzyme site polymorphisms suggests the presence of the beta IVS I 110 G----A mutation at least in three of these cases.