Welcome to the sickle cell anemia blog!
My brother, Brandon, has Sickle Cell Anemia and we thought it would be a good idea to teach the world about Sickle Cell Anemia. So together we want to help educate you about this blood disorder.
Sickle Cell Anemia is a hereditary blood disorder that affects the hemoglobin in blood. Sickle Cell Anemia is an autosomal recessive genetic disease. The hemoglobin (hee-muh-glow-bin) is protein that is found in red blood cells that helps move oxygen throughout the body. Having Sickle Cell Anemia makes your red blood cells more rigid and curved in the shape of a sickle rather than having a flexible disc-shape, doughnut like looking red blood cell. This occurs because of an abnormal shape of hemoglobin is made. The hemoglobin molecules group together causing the red blood cells to change into a curved form. The red blood cells that contain hemoglobin are able to go back and forth from being shaped normally to being shaped like a sickle, but eventually the red blood cell will become sickle shaped permanently.
Sickle Cell Anemia mainly affects people of African American, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern descent. More than 70,000 Americans have sickle cell anemia. Around two million Americans and 1 in 12 African Americans have the Sickle Cell Anemia trait. Having only the trait means they are carriers and carry a single gene for the disease and can be passed on to the offspring, but do not express the gene themselves.
