Video
Practice Pearls for the Management of SCD
Author(s):
A panel of experts in hematology discuss the future directions for sickle cell disease and share practice pearls for disease management.
Biree Andemariam, MD: I want to give us all an opportunity to give some advice or practice pearls to all of our viewers including other hematologists, maybe focusing a bit on red blood cell health or other areas that you think are important including decreasing long term organ damage. I’ll start with you Elna. What advice or practice pearls do you have for our audience?
Elna Saah, MD: I think it is the shifting paradigm that yes sickle cell is an anemia and it causes pain, but the thing that reduces survival and still has maintained the early mortality in sickle cell disease patients compared to the general population is not necessarily the pain or the pain episodes. It is the progressive organ dysfunction and so we should slowly move away from the deception of sickle cell being a mild disease. We should consider it like diabetes or hypertension and that the organ damage is also a silent killer. If we shift that paradigm the way we approach them and how we approach our practice even towards them, we will shift an emphasis in embracing and offering disease-modifying agents to almost all of our patients and having the discussion of the impact of end organ dysfunction and damage in overall longevity and mortality.
Biree Andemariam, MD: Thank you so much, Elna. Nirmish, you’re next.
Nirmish Shah, MD: I would just extend the conversation in the sense that educate and be real, continue to educate. I love the descriptions that came up in our conversation today. As I told Matt, I’m going to use some of those. I’m very graphic about drawing pictures and being in the room and getting them to really understand and see what’s happening inside of them because that gives them a little bit of control of knowing what’s happening to themselves. Otherwise, it’s a chronic disease that they have no control of. What control can you give them? It’s educating them about the disease and being able to tell others about what’s happening to them. I think the pearl for me is to educate them and that includes education about these new therapies, and the new drugs that are available now. I even actually started to talk to them about the new drugs that potentially could come.
When we talk about gene therapy, I still kind of give a teaser about it. We’re not there yet. It’s all about being real with them. We don’t have the data. I’m trying to get them to understand that’s why research studies are occurring; this is what we hope that patients can be involved enough with. The patients, I can’t say this enough, they’re really smart. They’re really savvy about connecting to others and they want the information. They just take it up and soak up this information and I think it’s good for the community. Those are some of the pearls. And I mentioned it before, talk about these new medicines when they don’t need it. Talk about everything but pain until you have to talk about pain. Elna brought this up, that there might be the pediatrician inside of us trying to think about the whole world and not the adult side, but I think that our adult colleagues, and I know Biree you do this as well, I think we’re understanding that the quality of life is a big deal. Thus, I think those are some things to consider as we have our colleagues continue to see patients with these new drugs.
Biree Andemariam, MD: Thank you so much, Nirmish. Matt?
Matthew M. Heeney, MD: I’ll leave you with 2 more images or analogies that I use because I think that there’s nothing sexy about having a chronic disease and a lot of it is just persistence of the patients, families, and providers in meeting the treatment goals and treatment plan. As I tell families when they’re going for their annual ophthalmology visit or their annual TCD [Trans Cranial Doppler], there’s nothing sexy about this. It’s like changing the oil in your car. It’s a pain. It’s annoying. It costs a little money. But if you don’t do it, what happens to the car? All the kids know the answer to that. It breaks down. Thus, that’s why [there is] this constant persistent pressure to keep on the plan is really very important.
The other one that I find useful to try and sometimes improve adherence to the treatment plan is the idea that organs are like a rock on the beach and the waves every day hit the beach, and they hit that rock and every day you don’t see anything. It’s just like the damage which is done every day with sickling even though you have no symptoms. There’s some clinical inexorable accrual of organ damage is what my mentor used to call it. There’s a little bit of damage every day that’s imperceptible. When you come back to that beach at the end of high school and you see the rock there, it’s still getting pounded by the wave and then you go away to college and then you have kids and you come back and all of a sudden there’s no rock on the beach. It’s just sand. It’s that daily pounding of that rock by a wave that you don’t notice the rock changes, but it’s becoming sand slowly and that’s what we’re trying to prevent with the daily damage of sickle cell disease on your organs.
Hydroxyurea and other disease-modifying agents are trying to prevent that from the daily point of view so that, as Nirmish pointed out or Elna pointed out, we’re trying to improve the overall health and organs of our patients who we present to our adult colleagues so that they can ultimately hopefully have a prolonged life and that sickle will no longer be an either immediately life-threatening or life-limiting disease, but hopefully have normal lifespan and quality of life. That’s really the goal. It’s hard. It’s hard to do that as a child, as a teen, and as an adult with so many other pressures on us but to encourage them to continue to follow the treatment plan with what we have while also being cognizant of what’s coming and what might be until something better comes along, as I say. Let’s follow this plan now. My promise is to keep them informed of what’s potentially available, both experimental and approved, and then they can choose collaboratively with us to potentially take on some of those new therapies.
Biree Andemariam, MD: Thank you, Matt. I really love the imagery in those analogies. I think we’ll all start to use them. I just wanted to add that I think when I speak to colleagues, clinicians of any specialty, patients, the community, family members who help to support their loves ones living with sickle cell disease; I really tell them that the tide is changing in sickle cell disease and it’s changing pretty quickly. Not only do we have more therapies available now, but our understanding of new potential targets is also growing exponentially and we’re seeing that playing out in the clinical trials that are available and that will be emerging in the near future. I think that sickle cell disease as we know it is changing. It is changing. Our patients may not feel that way today, but I do talk to my pediatric colleagues including some of you on the webinar today and I’m always heart-warmed when I hear the hydroxyurea story, for example. My colleagues say that ever since we’ve been giving it to babies starting at 9 months of age, we have such a healthier kindergarten class when we see those 5-year-old’s go off. That just warms my heart.
I think as an adult practitioner I’ve not yet begun fully to that extent to see the effects of novel agents or disease-modifying therapies or even transplant for that matter because we don’t do enough of it in the adult world. But I think that that tide is really changing. Just like hemophilia, for example, where we’ve come a long way, the expectation in hemophilia management is no leads. When we think about HIV care and we were making people toxic, sick with therapy as we knew it a few decades ago, and now people can be on 1 pill once a day. I think that there’s the potential in the very near future, hopefully in all of our lifetimes, to see that amazing impact on those affected by sickle cell disease. I’d say the future is definitely bright. I want to thank Elna, Nirmish, and Matt. And I want to thank you all for watching this HCPLive Peer Exchange. If you enjoyed the content, please subscribe for our E-newsletters to receive upcoming peer exchanges and other great content right in your inbox.
Transcript edited for clarity
