Sickle cell anemia symptoms- medicalloe

Sickle cell anemia: symptoms

Imagine for a minute that your blood cells are shaped like sickles sort of like that thing that the image of death carries out right but what exactly causes our friendly little red blood cells to turn against us sickle-cell anemia is a blood disorder where instead of supple soft Frisby red

blood cells that live for 120 days your body forms stiff pointy sickle shaped cells that only live for ten to twenty days RBC's need to be soft and pliable to squeeze through your blood vessels safely and efficiently so when they're pointy they can get stuck in there when this happens in the chest abdomen or joints it can cause pain if they get stuck in the hands or feet
 you can get swelling and of course if they get stuck in vital organs that can cause infections or if they get caught in the eye vision problems and if that wasn't bad enough the brittle cells can break apart delaying oxygen delivery and causing fatigue it's all sounds terrible it was first described in 1910 in a dental student named walter clemente noel who went to a doctor in chicago complaining of pain but this student wasn't from Chicago he was from Grenada sickle cell anemia predominantly affects approximately 1 in 400 African American births it was a disease known in Africa for about 5000 years but it had never been described in Western medicine before about a hundred
years ago the doctor in Chicago whose name was James B Herrick was the first to describe it in a paper and over the next century many doctors have attempted to uncover just how this debilitating disorder works and why it mainly affects those of African descent in the 1930s a DC based doctor named William Cardozo was one of the first black doctors to conduct research into this disease and he did so with a grant from Alpha Phi Alpha the first black fraternal organization Cardoso felt that research into sickle cell anemia had quote reached an impasse and that no one had yet
found the cause of this horrible disease if someone could provide a new stimulus to get the research going he wrote maybe we could discover more his research published in 1937 helped medicine realize that sickle cell anemia was inherited thanks to his research we now know that sickle cell anemia came from us and he helped explain why it mainly affects people of African descent which is huge while he was working on that other doctor started to realize that this disease was based on oxygen content in the blood in fact québécois researchers in 1930 Montreal took a seven-year-old black
 girl in restricted blood flow to her finger with a rubber band this probably wouldn't pass an ethics board today in doing so they found though that sickle cells formed in the low oxygen environment of her fingertip they learned that with a bit of hypoxia or lack of oxygen the normal cells could collapse into all manner of weird and pointy shapes nearly instantly returning to normal when exposed to air their methods were questionable to say the least but the results did shape future research
in the mid 20th century doctors discovered that a single amino acid was responsible for the hemoglobin on the red blood cells that caused the sickling but now that we understand the disorder enough to try and solve it unfortunately we're at another moment when we may need more new stimulus like Cardozo said according to a clinical investigation from 2007 there are many possible treatments for this disease including a bone-marrow transplant but there is still no cure one option is medicine
 that helps fetuses develop more hemoglobin but it can make the disease worse maybe in the future we could get genetic manipulation of the systems that help our bodies create blood using genome engineering or gene therapy but for now sickle cell anemia is just out there a life-threatening thorn in many people signs Cardoso was one of many doctors of many races in the hunt for causes of sickle-cell anemia he's notable because in the 1930s doctors that looked like him were often not
 welcome in the halls of Medicine that he was able to make a discovery for a disorder that affected so many people that also looked like him is a pretty big deal so we're happy to recognize the part he played in this story for Black History Month for more on red blood watch Jules's video about what bone marrow actually does here hint it is very important and please subscribe for more seeker when I think of red blood cells I think those soft little frisbees we used to throw around as kids I used to hit my brother's with him maybe that's why I think of RBC's is just so darn friendly thanks for watching.