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Shingles

Shingles

 An acute infection caused by the herpes zoster virus, the same virus as causes chickenpox. Shingles is most common after the age of 50 and the risk rises with advancing age. Shingles occurs because of exposure to chickenpox or reactivation of the herpes zoster virus. The virus remains latent (dormant) in nerve roots for many years following chickenpox.

Shingles is an extraordinarily painful condition that involves inflammation of sensory nerves. It causes numbness, itching or pain followed by the appearance of clusters of littles blisters in a strip pattern on one side of the body. The pain can persist for weeks, months or years after the rashheals and is then known as post-herpetic neuralgia.

People with shingles are contagious to persons who have not had chickenpox and can catch chickenpox from close contact with a person who has shingles.

The term shingles has nothing to do with a shingle on a roof or the small signboard outside the office of a doctor but is derived from the Latin cingulum meaning girdle, the idea being that shingles often girdles part of the body.

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sickle cell anemia

What conditions promote the sickling (distortion) of the red blood cells in sickle cell anemia?

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sickle cell anemia

What is sickle cell anemia?

Sickle cell anemia is one of the most common inherited blood anemias. The disease primarily affects Africans and African Americans. It is estimated that in the United States, some 50,000 African Americans are afflicted with the most severe form of sickle cell anemia. Overall, current estimates are that one in 1,875 U.S. African American is affected with sickle cell anemia.Sickle cell anemia (sickle cell disease) is a disorder of the blood caused by an inherited abnormalhemoglobin (an oxygen-carrying protein within the red blood cells). The abnormal hemoglobin causes distorted (sickled) red blood cells. The sickled red blood cells are fragile and prone to rupture. When the number of red blood cells decreases from rupture (hemolysis), anemia is the result. This condition is referred to as sickle cell anemia. The irregular sickled cells can also block blood vessels causing tissue and organ damage and pain.

How is sickle cell anemia inherited?

Sickle cell anemia is inherited as an autosomal (meaning that the gene is not linked to a sex chromosome) recessive condition whereas sickle cell trait is inherited as an autosomal dominant trait. This means that the gene can be passed on from a parent carrying it to male and female children. In order for sickle cell anemia to occur, a sickle cell gene must be inherited from both the mother and the father, so that the child has two sickle cell genes.

The inheritance of just one sickle gene is called sickle cell trait or the "carrier" state. Sickle cell trait does not cause sickle cell anemia. Persons with sickle cell trait usually do not have many symptoms of disease and have normal hospitalization rates and life expectancies. Sickle cell trait is present in some two million blacks in the United States (8% of the U.S. black population at birth). When two carriers of sickle cell trait mate, their offspring have a one in four chance of having sickle cell anemia. (In some parts of Africa, one in five persons is a carrier for sickle cell trait.)

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