21 december 2019 (Saturday) - Elliptocytosis


Look at this !!!  A ten-year-old child turned up at A&E this afternoon with a fever. The blood count was rather unremarkable, but my colleague made a blood film purely because the patient was a child. Rather unscientific perhaps, but I must admit that I tend to err on the side of caution.
But look at those red cells…

I’ve seen elliptocytosis before. The case which I remember most was an eighty-six year old chap with a chest infection. Just like today’s case the elliptocytosis was seen as a chance finding and is benign.

I couldn’t really find any decent complete references on the Internet; Google Scholar requires me to pay good money for access to the more academic articles, but (for all that it is frowned upon), the Wikipedia article does give a good summary.

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