Epidemiological and Clinical Profile

This is a descriptive cross-sectional study carried out at the Centre for Mixed Medicine and SS Anaemia, over a period of one year from January 2015 to January 2016 during which we analysed the epidemiological and clinical data of a sample of 244 homozygous SS sickle cell cases. The gender distribution did not reveal any predominance. The age of the patients varied between 1 and 50 years, with an average of 14.2±10.4 years, and the age group 0 to 9 years was the most represented. In terms of geographical distribution, the predominance of this condition is clear in the eastern part of the city of Kinshasa and the western part of the DRC. All patients were unmarried. 59% of patients were from the Revival Church. The most frequent complaints were pain (56.9%) and fever (27.45%). The main reasons for hospitalisation were painful vaso-occlusive crises (55.5%), followed by malaria (13.3%) and ischaemic stroke (8.9%). The average number of transfusions in our series was 2.78±2.18, and 54.9% of patients received 2 to 4 transfusions.