Spleen Sequestration and Sickle Cell Disease
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Seethal Jacob
In this program:
What is spleen sequestration in sickle cell patients? Watch as expert Dr. Seethal Jacob describes what occurs in the body during spleen sequestration or splenic crisis and how they teach parents to check for the condition in newborn sickle cell babies.
Transcript
Leo Hesse:
Now, I've heard about spleen crises, can you tell us, what is spleen...is it sequestration?
Dr. Seethal Jacob:
Yes, yeah.
Leo Hesse:
Can you tell us what that is?
Dr. Seethal Jacob:
Absolutely, so splenic sequestration or splenic crisis, as you mentioned, occurs when the spleen...I like to explain it as the plan kind of gets angry. So the...one of the important functions of the spleen is to filter the blood, and when it filters the blood, particularly in patients who have sickle cell disease, it's also filtering some of these sickled cells or broken up red blood cell and during that process, some of those cells can get stuck in the blood vessels that are supplying the spleen. When those get stuck, the screen doesn't stop trying to do what it's supposed to do, and it continues to pull blood into the spleen to try to filter it. Unfortunately, it's not pushing that blood back out, and as a result, the screen can get very big, and when the spleen gets big, it stretches that abdominal wall, and when it starts to stretch kind of the lining of that abdominal wall, it can become very, very painful. The spleen can hold a lot of blood, it can hold up to a third to a half of our blood volume, and when our blood volume drops that quickly, we as human beings cannot compensate very fast enough, and when we can't compensate fast enough n our patients with sickle cell disease who have these splenic crises can't compensate fast enough, they can get very sick and almost look like they're in shock or their heart’s not functioning very well, their blood pressure is very low, they may not be sort of thinking clearly and need really high level care as a result of that.
So we actually will teach families, we'll teach parents how to feel for spleens in their newborn babies, so that if the spleen starts to get big, families recognize it right away, they can call us, and we can have them evaluated urgently. So as I tell our families, a splenic crisis or a splenic sequestration is a medical emergency because they can get sick very fast.
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