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The most common type is known as sickle cell anemia. It results in an abnormality in the oxygen-carrying protein haemoglobin found in red blood cells. This leads to a rigid, sickle-like shape under certain circumstances. Problems in sickle cell disease typically begin around 5 to 6 months of age.
Sickle cell trait describes a condition in which a person has one abnormal allele of the hemoglobin beta gene (is heterozygous), but does not display the severe symptoms of sickle cell disease that occur in a person who has two copies of that allele (is homozygous).
Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease" is a 1949 scientific paper by Linus Pauling, Harvey A. Itano, Seymour J. Singer and Ibert C. Wells that established sickle-cell anemia as a genetic disease in which affected individuals have a different form of the metalloprotein hemoglobin in their blood.
Sickle-cell disease was the genetic disorder to be linked to a mutation of a specific protein. Pauling introduced his fundamentally important concept of sickle cell anemia as a genetically transmitted molecular disease. This vein (4) shows the interaction between the malaria sporozoites (6) with sickle cells (3) and regular cells (1).
Sickle-cell anemia (SCA) is a genetic disorder caused by the presence of two incompletely recessive alleles. When a sufferer's red blood cells are exposed to low- oxygen conditions, the cells lose their healthy round shape and become sickle-shaped.
Causes of increased breakdown include genetic disorders such as sickle cell anemia, infections such as malaria, and certain autoimmune diseases. Anemia can also be classified based on the size of the red blood cells and amount of hemoglobin in each cell.