Iron deficiency

One of the biggest themes of my life lately has been my iron status. In march, about six months ago, I had a routine blood test that showed I was anemic. My hemoglobin was 12.7 g/dL. My assumption was that this was caused by iron deficiency, because I had my ferritin measured a few years ago (late 2021), and it was low. Ferritin is used as a measure of your “iron stores”, since it is correlated with other measures of iron status in your body, so I already knew I was at risk of iron deficiency. What I didn’t realize a few years ago is that low iron is not something that you fix with a few days or weeks of iron supplementation. It takes months or longer to raise your iron stores from depleted-to-the-point-of-anemia into the normal range. And the anemia itself is a separate but related problem; it also takes months for your red blood cells and hemoglobin numbers to fully recover, because the life cycle of red blood cells is several months, and they are slowly regenerated with more hemoglobin in them over that timeframe.

Since March of this year, I have done a deep dive into the science of iron. In my effort to write more about the things that I’m learning about, I intend to write some things about iron. Maybe some of this will be of interest to someone on the web who finds my post through a web search, but I also want to write it up so that it doesn’t just live in my head until it’s forgotten. Because I, myself, may want a refresher some years from now. My intention is to put together a few different posts. One is about sources and losses of iron, and how one becomes deficient. Another is about iron-containing enzymes in your body, of which there are many, and they are rarely discussed in the context of iron deficiency (hemoglobin seems to be the only thing anyone thinks about). A third subject is iron supplementation, the protocol I followed, and why. I may have other things to say, but those are the ones I’m thinking about right now.