BACKGROUND Patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) often present with abdominal pain, usually attributable to vasoocclusion. Experience at a single institution suggested that appendicitis was a rare cause of abdominal symptoms in this population. OBJECTIVE We sought to determine whether the incidence of appendicitis was significantly lower in patients with SCD than in the population at large....

background: with the increasing concern for health and nutrition, dietary fat has attracted considerable attention. the composition of fatty acids in the diet is important because they are associated with major diseases including cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. the fatty acid synthase (fasn) and stearoyl-coa desaturase (delta-9-desaturase) (scd) genes affect fatty acid compositio...

Introduction High white blood cell (WBC) count is an indicator of sickle cell disease (SCD) severity, however, there are limited studies on WBC counts in Saudi Arabian patients with SCD. The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of abnormal leukocyte count (either low or high) and identify factors associated with high WBC counts in a sample of Saudi patients with SCD. Methods A cro...

Intermittent painful crises due to vasoocclusion are the major clinical manifestation of sickle cell disease (SCD), but subclinical episodes may also occur. There is sparse evidence for the involvement of neutrophils in the pathophysiology of SCD, but production of cytokines by the damaged endothelium might influence neutrophil function and modulate responses to subsequent cytokine exposure. In...

This study explored the challenges faced by adolescents with sickle cell disease (SCD) and their parents and the work they engage in to progressively shift from parent management to independent adolescent self-management. DESIGN AND METHODS A qualitative descriptive focus-group design with semi-structured interviews was used with adolescents (11-18 years) with SCD (HbSS genotype) and their pa...

Among the many families of nonperiodic tilings known so far, SCD tilings are still a bit mysterious. Here, we determine the diffraction spectra of point sets derived from SCD tilings and show that they have no absolutely continuous part, that they have a uniformly discrete pure point part on the axis Re3, and that they are otherwise supported on a set of concentric cylinder surfaces around this...

BACKGROUND Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a chronic disease associated with high degrees of morbidity and increased mortality. Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) among adults with sickle cell disease has not been widely reported. METHODS We administered the Medical Outcomes Study 36-item Short-Form to 308 patients in the Pain in Sickle Cell Epidemiology Study (PiSCES) to assess HRQOL. Scale...

It is well known that transit through the epididymis involves an increase in the compaction of sperm chromatin, which acquires fully condensed status at the caput epididymidis. The purpose of this study was to compare the terminal deoxyribonucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end-labelling (TUNEL) assay, the comet assay, the sperm chromatin structure assay (SCSA) and the sperm chromatin d...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Data collected by the US Renal Data System (USRDS) identify sudden cardiac death (SCD) as the leading cause of death among hemodialysis patients. However, evidence suggests that clinical events captured on the USRDS death notification form may be inaccurate. A new method for classifying SCD was recently developed to enhance the accuracy of SCD classification. This stud...