This Week in sickle cell news march 23rd to the 29th

By Sean Marshall

An article was posted on the 25th of March on Health Aim’s website this week about scientists identifying an enzyme in blood stem cells that could prevent sickle cell from occurring. It was explained in the article that scientists from The Scripps Research Institute conducted a study on stem cells’ ability to reconstruct and divide. The reason this whole study was being conducted was that it appeared that there is an enzyme in red blood cells that regulates how fast they divide and repair cells. When foreign stem cells are introduced into the body the enzyme, named HSC, remains active to long and then disappears causing “causing the test subjects in this case mice to lose all there red blood cells and die.”

The article stressed the reason this is so important is because certain anemia’s both sickle and other are often caused by certain deficiencies. For an example sickle cell has a vitamin D deficiency while another blood anemia can be caused by a lack of B12. The article then explains that with all this knowledge at there disposal there could be a way to combine there new found knowledge of HSC with the treatments at hand and combine them to cure many different blood anemia including sickle cell.

If you would like to see the full details the full article can be found here: http://www.healthaim.com/scientists-identify-turnkey-enzyme-blood-stem-cells-prevent-anemia/18446

A new study was released this week by medical press that when comparing a healthy pregnancy to one where the mother to be has sickle cell disease the one with sickle cell disease is “six times more likely to die during or following child birth, have an increased risk of stillbirth, high blood pressure and preterm delivery.”

The article did explain that previous research has identified an “association between sickle cell diseases and high-risk pregnancy; however, specialists have not yet been able to estimate a woman’s individual risk for specific complications, nor have they been able to identify groups of women at highest risk.”

Unfortunately it was explained that the medical world lacks the proper evidence to diagnosis individuals. This means all that doctors can do at the moment is inform patients of all the risks that could happen instead of telling a patient if they are more likely to suffer from one symptom over another. There is a team of researchers from Kings College in London England attempting to find answers.

Their work has revealed that “that pregnant women with classic SCD living in a low-income country were at the highest risk for complications.” The last quote of the article may have been the most powerful. It was stated that “even in developed countries with advanced care, there continues to be a much higher maternal mortality rate in women with sickle cell disease compared to the general population.”

The entire article can be found here: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-pregnancy-complications-women-sickle-cell.html

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