The pain from a heart attack is so bad that – if you can imagine – it can feel like an elephant sitting on you. Patients with sickle cell disease, a genetic condition affecting the red blood cells, report that this kind of pain begins before their first birthday and continues intermittently for a lifetime.
I am a professor of nursing, and my research focuses on managing pain in sickle cell and cancer patients. I also am a member of the Lancet Haematology Commission, which recently published a report showing paths forward toward worldwide health equity for patients with sickle cell disease.
Here are some key challenges and opportunities I have seen for helping sickle cell patients cope with this disease.
The biology of sickle cell disease
Sickle cell disease results from genetics – more specifically, the inheritance of faulty hemoglobin genes, one from each parent.
Hemoglobin is the iron-rich part of the red blood cell that allows it to carry oxygen from the lungs to all cells in the body.
But sickle hemoglobin – known as hemoglobin “S,” which is the faulty hemoglobin gene – causes the typically round red blood cell to be crescent-shaped, like a banana or a sickle. These sickle cells, which are sticky and very stiff, get trapped in tiny blood vessels and block blood flow and oxygen delivery to the body’s organs and tissues.
The pain from a heart attack is so bad that – if you can imagine – it can feel like an elephant sitting on you. Patients with sickle cell disease, a genetic condition affecting the red blood cells, report that this kind of pain begins before their first birthday and continues intermittently for a lifetime.
I am a professor of nursing, and my research focuses on managing pain in sickle cell and cancer patients. I also am a member of the Lancet Haematology Commission, which recently published a report showing paths forward toward worldwide health equity for patients with sickle cell disease.
Here are some key challenges and opportunities I have seen for helping sickle cell patients cope with this disease.
Fifty years ago, Philadelphia prison officials ended a medical testing program that had allowed a University of Pennsylvania researcher to conduct human testing on incarcerated people, many of them Black
Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday recommended expanding the use of vaccines to adults between 50-64 years to protect against pneumococcal disease.