Benefits of kinesiotherapy and aquatic rehabilitation on sickle cell anemia. A case report.

The process of hemoglobin polymerization and the consequent sickling of red blood cells that occurs in patients with sickle cell disease shortens the half-life of red blood cells. It causes vaso-occlusive complications, as well as pain and pulmonary and cardiovascular dysfunction. We evaluated an aquatic rehabilitation program used for patients with sickle cell anemia and examined the possible benefits that exercise in warm water has for the circulatory system, for relieving pain, and for increasing lung capacity. The patient was a 32-year-old female. The parameters that we used in this study include respiratory muscle strength (which was calculated by measuring maximum inspiratory pressures and maximum expiratory pressures), the McGill and Wisconsin pain questionnaires (in order to evaluate the patients' characterizations and descriptions of their pain), and the SF-36 Health Survey. The treatment included warm water exercises, stretching, aerobic exercise, and relaxation, during two sessions of 45 min per week for 5 weeks. The patient experienced a significant decrease in pain, a significant increase in the strength of respiratory muscles, and improved quality of life. We conclude that aquatic rehabilitation can be used to improve the clinical condition of sickle cell anemia patients, and we encourage more research on this new treatment regime, in comparison with other types of therapies.

Three-dimensional visualization of human hemoglobin phenotypes with HPLC.

Hemoglobinopathies were included in the Brazilian Neonatal Screening Program on June 6, 2001. Automated high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was indicated as one of the diagnostic methods. The amount of information generated by these systems is immense, and the behavior of groups cannot always be observed in individual analyses. Three-dimensional (3-D) visualization techniques can be applied to extract this information, for extracting patterns, trends or relations from the results stored in databases. We applied the 3-D visualization tool to analyze patterns in the results of hemoglobinopathy based on neonatal diagnosis by HPLC. The laboratory results of 2520 newborn analyses carried out in 2001 and 2002 were used. The "Fast", "F1", "F" and "A" peaks, which were detected by the analytical system, were chosen as attributes for mapping. To establish a behavior pattern, the results were classified into groups according to hemoglobin phenotype: normal (N = 2169), variant (N = 73) and thalassemia (N = 279). 3-D visualization was made with the FastMap DB tool; there were two distribution patterns in the normal group, due to variation in the amplitude of the values obtained by HPLC for the F1 window. It allowed separation of the samples with normal Hb from those with alpha thalassemia, based on a significant difference (p < 0.05) between the mean values of the "Fast" and "A" peaks, demonstrating the need for better evaluation of chromatograms; this method could be used to help diagnose alpha thalassemia in newborns.