Added Value of Speckle Tracking in the Evaluation of Patients With Sickle Cell Disease
Added Value of Speckle Tracking in the Evaluation of Patients With Sickle Cell Disease
Sickle Cell Disease is a serious disease that is life-threatening for patients being
 homozygous for the SS form or heterozygous for the SC or βthal forms. The CHU Brugmann
 hospital currently regularly treats about 70 homozygous adult patients and this number is in
 constant augmentation.

 Sickle cell disease patients may develop a cardiomyopathy due to chronic anemia, the
 haemosiderosis risk or, less frequently, to coronary vaso-occlusive damages.

 The hypervolemia in patients with sickle cell disease causes an overestimation of the ejected
 left ventricular fraction measured by echocardiography, this parameter being very dependent
 of the blood volume.It has already been shown that the left ventricular ejection fraction was
 normal in most patients with sickle cell disease, but that its evaluation by parameters
 independent from the blood volume showed the existence of a dysfunction.

 Myocardial strain, as measured by speckle tracking, is a echographic evaluation method of the
 cardiac function, independent of the blood volume. This technique hasn't been used much in
 sickle cell disease patients. A study using 3D speckle tracking on a limited number of sickle
 cell disease patients failed to show a strain anomaly. Moreover, the study highlighted a
 higher global longitudinal strain in this patient population. The investigators find these
 data hard to explain and in contradiction with previous studies using other cardiac function
 evaluation techniques, independent from the blood volume.

 The primary goal of this study is thus

 -  to study the longitudinal strain by 2D echography

 -  to determine if anomalies of the longitudinal strain exist in sickle cell disease
 patients with a normal ejected left ventricular fraction, compared to a control group of
 healthy patients.

 The secondary goal of this study is to correlate, inside the sickle cell disease group, the
 possible strain anomalies with biological gravity parameters of the disease.
Inclusion Criteria:

 -  All sickle cell disease patients

 Exclusion Criteria:

 -  Insufficient echogenicity