If you got here, chances are you received a call from the Oregon state lab informing you that a newborn in your practice inherited a hemolgobin trait or disease. This website summarizes diagnosis and care for healthcare providers, namely primary care providers, in order to provide the best informed care to our community.
Please call Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) pediatric hematology/oncology clinic at the phone number provided on the letter if further questions persist (please do not have your patients call us directly since they are not a registered patient at ohsu). Click on the appropriate link below.
Before we go on, let us review hemoglobin. Each red blood cell (RBC) contains approximately 250 million molecules of hemoglobin (and we have about 25 trillion RBCs, so that is a lot of hemoglobin!). Each hemoglobin molecule is a tetramer, made up of two identical alpha globin chains and two identical beta globin chains. HbH disease occurs when there is a mutation in alpha globin.
