My daughter has sickle cell pain always arround her period, what can we do?
Many women with sickle cell disease experience pain around the time of their menstrual periods. Female hormone changes probably affect the way sickle cells and blood vessels interact. The use of ibuprofen at the very onset of the periods is a good idea, but needs to continue around the clock for the duration of the period (600 mg every 6 hours) in order to maintain an effect on reducing inflammation. Alternative medications include Naprosyn, another member of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug type. This approach may not completely prevent the pain episode, so a stronger pain medicine like Tylenol with Codeine should be begun as soon as she is having moderate or worse pain, to try to keep the symptoms from getting too severe. Lastly, for women who have this problem every single month, we have some success with hormone treatments to try to keep the estrogen and progesterone in the body from going to extremes. This would involve the medications usually used for birth control – the
