Pernicious Anemia Essay

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Pernicious anemia (PA) is an autoimmune disease that destroys the body’s stomach cells, mainly the fundus of the stomach thereby causing hematologic, neurologic, gastrointestinal and psychiatric abnormalities. PA is difficult to diagnosis due to it slow onset and progressive severity over a 20-30 years period causing undiagnosed persons to adjust to certain symptoms like hypoxia, palpitations, dizziness and fatigue. Furthermore, neurologic signs and symptoms like paresthesia and ataxia are the usual reason medical attention is sought, additionally paresthesia and ataxia that are cause by PA can not be reversed after being present for more than 6 months. Therefore Deb’s NP should ask about paresthesia and ataxia and begin treatment as soon as possible (Mennella & Pravikoff, 2016). …show more content…

Therefore, one of the treatment goals of PA is to resolve the deficiency in vitamin B12 and patients that are lacking intrinsic factor that binds with dietary vitamin B12 are prescribed B12 intramuscular(IM) (Mennella & Pravikoff, 2016)..
Mean corpuscular volume (MCV) is the size of the average red blood (80 to 100 femtoliter) and is known as macrocytic anemia when it is above normal due to chemotherapy, low folate or B12, while mean corpuscular hemoglobin (MCH) is the amount of hemoglobin in red blood cell (27 to 31 picograms/cell) and is known as normocytic anemia due to sudden blood loss, kidney failure, long-term diseases, man made heart valve or aplastic anemia(Martin, 2016). Macrocytic-normochromic anemia is an anemia with high MCV and normal MCH (McCance & Huether,

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