A two-sex age-structured population dynamics model for thalassemia transmission

Thalassemia is an inherited autosomal recessive disease that is characterized by the absence or reduced synthesis of globin chains of hemoglobin. Due to globalization, thalassemia has become a global public health concern. The main objective of this research is to develop a two-sex age-structured continuoustype population dynamics model that describes the genotype composition of the population resulting from the thalassemia trait. The existence and uniqueness of a continuous solution to the proposed model are established. To verify our model, we run a numerical simulation to predict the growth of the population structured by the thalassemia trait in Sri Lanka, over the decade from 2011 to 2021. According to the numerical results, the total thalassemia major female and male populations in 2021 are estimated to be 1,141 and 1,111, respectively. Compared to the reported values, the errors for these figures are 8.5% and 9.7%, respectively. Hence, the numerical results verify the overall validity of the proposed age-structured two-sex population model to describe the dynamics of thalassemia transmission in a population.