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Old Sat Aug 24, 2013, 09:41 PM
curlygirl curlygirl is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2013
Posts: 151
Red blood cell Morphology

Hello! As I mentioned in other threads, my son was diagnosed with Aplastic Anemia in April 2013, and had ATG in July 2013. So he is one month post-ATG and on cyclosporine (Neoral). I've been reading a lot about Aplastic Anemia, bone marrow failure, and auo-immune diseases in general, but for some reason tonight was the fist night that I landed on the National Hematologic Diseases Information Service (NHDIS) website: http://hematologic.niddk.nih.gov/aplasticanemia.aspx. One thing that caught my eye was the sentence: "Although production of mature blood cells is seriously impaired in aplastic anemia, the few blood cells that mature and enter the bloodstream are normal."

My son's Red Blood Cell (RBC) morphology has been listed as "normal" on his manual differential at exactly two visits in five months: one visit one week after ATG, when he was on Prednisone, and one visit last week while he was on Acyclovir. (He developed a nasty virus and had to be hospitalized.) Also, while on both of those medicines his WBC count increased. They decreased back to pre-medicine levels after going off the Prednisone and Acyclovir. At every other visits he's had "abnormal" red blood cells, including: Macrocytes, Microcytes, Ovalocytes, Schistocytes, Tear Drop Cells, and Hypochromasia, often including all of them at the same visit. I just wanted to make sure that other people are seeing these. Our hematologists said that they have seen this before, and I figured that it was a function of my son's bone marrow just trying to throw out whatever it can since it is under stress. I also thought it may have been because the packed RBCs used for transfusions are frozen and may undergo some abnormalities as they are thawed. So the article threw me off when it said that the RBCs should be "normal."

Thanks!
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