health information
How did sickle cell anemia form because of Malaria?
I’m doing a presentation on sickle cell anemia and I read that it started to protect the red blood cell against malaria. I need to describe how it protects the person from malaria. Can anyone make it in simple terms for me? Im looking online and all i can find is information about malaria and a lot of medical terms that i don’t understand.
FLAWDA::BABii – YES, a person with sickle cell anemia (SCA) does provide some protection against getting malaria. Only in some individuals do malaria episodes progress to severe life-threatening disease, while in the majority the episodes are self-limiting. This is partly because of host genetic factors such as the sickle cell gene.
The sickle cell gene is caused by a single amino acid mutation. Inheritance of this mutated gene from both parents leads to sickle cell disease and people with this disease have shorter life expectancy. On the contrary, individuals who are carriers for the sickle cell disease (with one sickle gene and one normal hemoglobin gene, also known as sickle cell trait) have some protective advantage against malaria. As a result, the frequencies of sickle cell carriers are high in malaria-endemic areas.
Most early studies of the connection between sickle cell trait and malaria allowed us to investigate this connection. The sickle cell trait provides 60% protection against overall mortality. Most of this protection occurs between 2-16 months of life, before the onset of clinical immunity in areas with intense transmission of malaria.