In fact, the diagnosis of iron deficiency is not clear-cut and if a person’s symptoms improve with iron supplementation, they can still be diagnosed with iron deficiency (Schrier, 2018).įigure 1. Iron deficiency can be diagnosed when serum ferritin is less than 30 ng/mL (Goodnough, 2010), though others would argue one can be symptomatic at levels of less than 50ng/mL. Men typically have 4g of iron in the body while females have 2.5g. Iron deficiency is when the body has inadequate iron. However, in runners and in the general population, the most common cause is iron deficiency. So what is anemia? Simply put, it is a condition in which you don’t have enough healthy red blood cells to carry adequate oxygen to the body’s tissues. It can be caused by a number of things including blood loss, lack of iron, lack of B12 or folate, destruction of red blood cells (called hemolysis), or failure of the bone marrow to produce enough blood cells. My treating doctors were incredulous, how could an otherwise healthy woman who had not been bleeding (I did not get my period at that time so yes, you could say this was not healthy) become so severely anemic? Anemia and Iron Deficiency: Background and Prevalence This was profound anemia severe enough to get me admitted to the hospital. Eventually the blood tests came back and my hemoglobin was 5.8 g/dL (normal is 12.1 to 15.1 in women, as shown in Figure 6 below) and my hematocrit was 19% (normal is 37 to 48% for women). The doctor who saw me also wondered about my liver function since I was very yellow-colored.
My systolic blood pressure was in the 160s (normally it was in the 90s). Well sure, I was scared, but I didn’t think I was having a panic attack. The staff wondered if I was having a panic attack. That afternoon, I went directly from class to the walk-in clinic of our medical school. As much as I wanted to believe nothing was wrong, as much as I wanted to avoid going to see a doctor, I realized I could not live like this. Then, I had barely been able to muster a jog, and if I did, I felt my heart pounding in my chest, even skipping beats. But in the last couple of weeks, my daily runs had been getting really tough. I was a runner who regularly logged 70 to 80 miles a week without really getting winded. If I walked, I was so short of breath that I felt like I might die. I could not walk even four blocks to get to medical school–it was that bad.
Why running leads to chronic blood and iron loss.A couple of cases of anemia in female runners.Hemoglobin, iron, ferritin, and exercise performance.
The epidemiology of anemia and iron deficiency in runners.
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