Association between Elevated Depressive Symptoms and Clinical Disease Severity in African-American Adults with Sickle Cell Disease

Posted by James

INTRODUCTION

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the term used to describe the symptomatic disorders associated with hemoglobin S, an abnormal hemoglobin mutation, and is one of the most common genetic diseases among African Americans. The term “sickle cell disease” includes sickle cell anemia, sickle hemoglobin-C disease and the sickle-6 thalassemias and does not usually refer to sickle cell trait. The most prevalent types are sickle cell anemia and sickle-hemoglobin-C disease. Approximately one out of every 500 and one out of every 6,000 African Americans have sickle cell anemia and sickle hemoglobin-C disease, respectively. SCD is characterized by painful sickle cell crisis episodes that often require hospitalization for the symptomatic relief of pain. These crisis episodes may last for up to several days at a time and are the most frequent cause of hospital admission in patients with SCD. Previous studies have found elevated depressive symptoms in 43-56% of SCD patients. Those who report more frequent painful sickle cell episodes are more likely to be depressed. Depression has also been associated with an increased number of hospital emergency room visits for sickle cell crisis episodes. One limitation of prior studies of depression in SCD subjects was that a non-SCD group was not used for comparison purposes, making it more difficult to interpret the results.

The aim of this study was to further examine the relationship between SCD and elevated depressive symptoms among African-American, adult subjects with SCD while using a non-SCD, African-American adult population as a control group and stratifying according to the clinical severity of SCD. cialis canada online pharmacy