Conformational changes of β-thalassemia major hemoglobin and oxidative status of plasma after in vitro exposure to extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields: An artificial neural network analysis

Electromagnetic fields (EMF) can generate reactive oxygen species and induce oxidative modifications. We investigated the effects of extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields (ELF-EMF) on oxidative status of plasma and erythrocytes in beta-thalassemia major patients and design artificial neural networks (ANN) for evaluating the oxyHb concentration. Blood samples were obtained from age and sex-matched healthy donors (n = 12) and major beta-thalassemia patients (n = 12) and subjected to 0.5 and 1 mT and 50 Hz of EMF. Plasma oxidative status was estimated after 1 and 2 h exposure to ELE-EMF. Structural changes of plasma proteins were investigated by Native PAGE and SDS-PAGE. Moreover; multilayer perceptron (MLP) method was applied for designing a feed forward ANN model to predict the impact of these oxidative and antioxidative parameters on oxyHb concentration. Two hour exposure to ELF-EMF induced significant oxidative changes on major beta-thalassemia samplesElectrophoretic profiles showed two high molecular weight (HMW) protein aggregates in plasma samples from healthy donors and major beta-thalassemia patients. According to our ANN design, the main predictors of oxyHb concentration were optical density of Hb at 542, 340, 569, 630, 577, and 420 nm and metHb and hemichrome (HC) concentration. Accuracy of the proposed ANN model was shown by predicted by observed chart (y = 1.3 + 0.96x, R-2 = 0.942), sum of squares errors (SSR), and relative errors (RE). Our results showed the detailed effects of ELF-EMF on Hb structure and oxidative balance of plasma in major beta-thalassemia patients and significance of ANN analysis during normal and pathologic conditions.