All you need to know about sickle-cell disease
A
new study sheds light on how sickle-cell disease occurs when deformed red blood
cells clump together, blocking tiny blood vessels and causing severe pain and
swelling in the affected body parts.
Sickle-cell
disease, also known as sickle-cell anemia, is a group of disorders that
lead to deformation and break down of red blood cells.
Researchers
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) analysed blood from patients
with sickle-cell disease and revealed the process of cell clumping.
Known
as vaso-occlusive pain crises, the findings represent a step towards being able
to predict when such a crisis might occur.
"These
painful crises are very much unpredictable. In a sense, we understand why they
happen, but we don't have a good way to predict them yet," said Ming Dao,
a principal researcher and one of the senior authors of the study.
The
researchers found that these painful events are most likely to be produced by
immature red blood cells, called reticulocytes, which are more prone to stick
to blood vessel walls Read
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