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Management of adults with sickle cell disease (SCD) often is complicated by patients' inabilities to adhere to therapy and attend medical appointments consistently. These problems might be attributable to the chronic nature of SCD, to patients' cultural milieu, or to socioeconomic issues. Now, study results offer another possible explanation: neurocognitive deficits resulting from SCD.
Investigators evaluated 149 adults with SCD (age range, 19–55; mean, 32) and 47 matched healthy black controls using a battery of neuropsychological tests; patients with overt neurological disease were excluded. In addition, participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain. Mean hemoglobin levels were 8.3 g/dL and 13.8 g/dL for patients and…