Abstract
Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a blood disorder with few treatment options currently available. However, in recent years, there has been much progress toward developing new therapies and curative treatments to help patients with SCD. Stem cell transplant remains the only approved curative treatment for SCD, but new clinical trials are being initiated using gene therapy and gene editing. We surveyed patients with sickle cell disease (N=9) about attitudes toward stem cell transplant, gene therapy to add a new healthy gene, gene editing to up-regulate fetal hemoglobin, or gene editing to correct the point mutation. The participants read a fact sheet that included objective information on each curative treatment. When asked which curative treatment each participant would choose, all four options were selected at least once. The most highly selected treatment was gene correction gene editing (N=4). Participants generally agreed that the four treatment options are beneficial but were more mixed in their thoughts on whether the options are dangerous. Reasons for selecting a particular curative treatment were variable, but the most selected reasons were perception of a cure (N=4) or decreased severity (N=4), and not needing a donor (N=4). We are at the beginning stages of understanding how patients with SCD make decisions about curative treatments. Currently, patients may be interested in any of the four possibilities for curative treatments, with gene correction gene editing as the most popular choice. Reasons for choosing one treatment over another are mixed.
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23 December 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12687-021-00569-6
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Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge and thank all our participants who offered their time to participate in this study. This study was completed in partial fulfillment of the first author’s degree requirements.
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The research was supported by the Stanford University School of Medicine Genetic Counseling Program. No outside funding was obtained.
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All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.
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The original version of this article was revised. Figure 1 is now corrected.
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Booth, A., Bonham, V., Porteus, M. et al. Treatment decision-making in sickle cell disease patients. J Community Genet 13, 143–151 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12687-021-00562-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12687-021-00562-z