Sickle cell anemia explained
Sickle cell anemia explained
Learn about sickle cell anemia.
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Transcript
SPEAKER 1: One of my friends died of sickle cell anemia. She died when she was about 11.
SPEAKER 2: Nobody else but us, people that have pain, know how it feels.
SPEAKER 3: It's a disease among blacks only.
SPEAKER 1: Basically, we knew that she died of some type of blood disorder because she was always skinny, and she never played like the rest of us did.
SPEAKER 2: It feels like somebody's hitting you with a hammer.
SPEAKER 3: All of us don't have it. It's just every now and then it pops up.
NARRATOR: Sickle cell disease is a condition with which most African-Americans are familiar. It's an inherited blood disorder, which although most common in people of African origin, also affects populations around the Mediterranean, throughout the Arab world, and into the Indian subcontinent. In today's multiracial societies it is a condition of which everybody should be aware.
It's estimated that over a quarter of a million children are born with sickle cell disease worldwide every year. Sickle cell disease drastically reduces the life expectancy of sufferers, who experience recurrent bouts of crippling pain. The typical symptoms have been recognized for centuries in Africa, and are well known to traditional healers.
JEMIMA DENNIS-ANTWI: Traditionally, I would say that most people are aware of the disease, in the form of the way the signs and the symptoms present, and they give names such as [NON-ENGLISH].
So every tribe has these specific name it gives, and it all tends to describe the signs of the disease, especially the pain that they go through with the disease.
SPEAKER 4: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
NARRATOR: Africans were taken to the Americas as slaves from the 16th century onwards, but despite the traditional recognition of the condition in Africa, it seems to have escaped the notice of American physicians until the beginning of the 20th century.
Even then, it was first diagnosed not in an African-American, but in a West Indian student, Walter Clement Noel, whose family tomb still lies on his native island of Grenada. It was by chance that Noel happened to consult James Herrick, a doctor with an interest in hematology, the study of blood.
KWAKU OHENE-FREMPONG: A dental student from Grenada walked into a hospital in Chicago and showed up with symptoms that baffled the doctors at that time. And it wasn't until the blood smear of that patient was looked at before sickle cells were discovered. Africans had been in America for over 400 years, and there was no report of sickle cell disease anywhere in the medical literature in America after that time. I think that is surprising.
KIM SMITH-WHITLEY: It is fascinating, in a sense, that it took so long, because if you know the clinical course of sickle cell disease and the number of recurrent pain episodes of those individuals experienced, I can't imagine what a physician would interpret those kind of symptoms to.
OHENE-FREMPONG: I can imagine that there were many slaves who, if they did not survive the severe forms of sickle cell disease, would survive the milder forms of it and who would have the frequent attacks of pain, swelling of the hands and feet in the children, pneumonia, and other complications that we know very well that sickle cell disease can develop.
SMITH-WHITLEY: Possibly African-Americans with sickle cell disease did not survive until they had better access to medical care, and actually go into their teenage years and develop some of the late complications of sickle cell disease.
NARRATOR: What Herrick noticed under the microscope were some unusually shaped blood cells. His discovery led to a search for the cause and explanation of the disease, which was to take nearly half a century.
OHENE-FREMPONG: Sickle cell disease a very well known disease now. We understand very clearly that red blood cells of patients with sickle cell disease behave very differently from normal red blood cells. In normal red blood cells, the chemical-- the protein called hemoglobin, which is the oxygen carrier in the blood-- always remains as a nice solution in the red blood cell. This makes the red blood cell very soft, and able to squeeze through very, very small capillaries in the body.
Sickle cells, unfortunately, behave differently. When the sickle hemoglobin is carrying oxygen, it behaves pretty much like normal hemoglobin, but when it gives up the oxygen that it's supposed to give up to the body, then the hemoglobin in there begins to gel, and this gel forces the cells to become distorted. They become distorted into these sickle cells, as we call them, which also become very stiff. And these stiff cells then cannot pass through the tiny capillaries, so they tend to block them.
So there are two basic problems that we see in sickle cell disease. One is that these cells block the flow of blood to different parts of the body, and wherever this blockage occurs tissue becomes inflamed, and eventually the tissue may get damaged if oxygen supply is not restored.
SPEAKER 2: Nobody else but us, people that have pain, know how it feels.
SPEAKER 3: It's a disease among blacks only.
SPEAKER 1: Basically, we knew that she died of some type of blood disorder because she was always skinny, and she never played like the rest of us did.
SPEAKER 2: It feels like somebody's hitting you with a hammer.
SPEAKER 3: All of us don't have it. It's just every now and then it pops up.
NARRATOR: Sickle cell disease is a condition with which most African-Americans are familiar. It's an inherited blood disorder, which although most common in people of African origin, also affects populations around the Mediterranean, throughout the Arab world, and into the Indian subcontinent. In today's multiracial societies it is a condition of which everybody should be aware.
It's estimated that over a quarter of a million children are born with sickle cell disease worldwide every year. Sickle cell disease drastically reduces the life expectancy of sufferers, who experience recurrent bouts of crippling pain. The typical symptoms have been recognized for centuries in Africa, and are well known to traditional healers.
JEMIMA DENNIS-ANTWI: Traditionally, I would say that most people are aware of the disease, in the form of the way the signs and the symptoms present, and they give names such as [NON-ENGLISH].
So every tribe has these specific name it gives, and it all tends to describe the signs of the disease, especially the pain that they go through with the disease.
SPEAKER 4: [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
NARRATOR: Africans were taken to the Americas as slaves from the 16th century onwards, but despite the traditional recognition of the condition in Africa, it seems to have escaped the notice of American physicians until the beginning of the 20th century.
Even then, it was first diagnosed not in an African-American, but in a West Indian student, Walter Clement Noel, whose family tomb still lies on his native island of Grenada. It was by chance that Noel happened to consult James Herrick, a doctor with an interest in hematology, the study of blood.
KWAKU OHENE-FREMPONG: A dental student from Grenada walked into a hospital in Chicago and showed up with symptoms that baffled the doctors at that time. And it wasn't until the blood smear of that patient was looked at before sickle cells were discovered. Africans had been in America for over 400 years, and there was no report of sickle cell disease anywhere in the medical literature in America after that time. I think that is surprising.
KIM SMITH-WHITLEY: It is fascinating, in a sense, that it took so long, because if you know the clinical course of sickle cell disease and the number of recurrent pain episodes of those individuals experienced, I can't imagine what a physician would interpret those kind of symptoms to.
OHENE-FREMPONG: I can imagine that there were many slaves who, if they did not survive the severe forms of sickle cell disease, would survive the milder forms of it and who would have the frequent attacks of pain, swelling of the hands and feet in the children, pneumonia, and other complications that we know very well that sickle cell disease can develop.
SMITH-WHITLEY: Possibly African-Americans with sickle cell disease did not survive until they had better access to medical care, and actually go into their teenage years and develop some of the late complications of sickle cell disease.
NARRATOR: What Herrick noticed under the microscope were some unusually shaped blood cells. His discovery led to a search for the cause and explanation of the disease, which was to take nearly half a century.
OHENE-FREMPONG: Sickle cell disease a very well known disease now. We understand very clearly that red blood cells of patients with sickle cell disease behave very differently from normal red blood cells. In normal red blood cells, the chemical-- the protein called hemoglobin, which is the oxygen carrier in the blood-- always remains as a nice solution in the red blood cell. This makes the red blood cell very soft, and able to squeeze through very, very small capillaries in the body.
Sickle cells, unfortunately, behave differently. When the sickle hemoglobin is carrying oxygen, it behaves pretty much like normal hemoglobin, but when it gives up the oxygen that it's supposed to give up to the body, then the hemoglobin in there begins to gel, and this gel forces the cells to become distorted. They become distorted into these sickle cells, as we call them, which also become very stiff. And these stiff cells then cannot pass through the tiny capillaries, so they tend to block them.
So there are two basic problems that we see in sickle cell disease. One is that these cells block the flow of blood to different parts of the body, and wherever this blockage occurs tissue becomes inflamed, and eventually the tissue may get damaged if oxygen supply is not restored.