Iron supplements, Blood and Memory

[Guest guest]

Hi all,

 

Well surprise surprise, they're catching up ever so slowly. Taken

from: http://uk.news./040420/12/erilh.html

 

Iron tablets can improve women's brainpower

 

By Shaoni Bhattacharya

 

The brainpower of young women who are lacking in iron can be

markedly boosted by taking supplements of the mineral, suggests a

new study.

 

Even women who were just modestly iron deficient did much worse on

attention, memory and learning tests than those with enough iron in

their blood, found the study by researchers at Pennsylvania State

University in the US.

 

" The iron deficient women took longer to do tasks and were less

successful, " says John Beard, one of the team. For those classified

as anaemic the difference was particularly stark, he says: " The

number of errors in a memory task was double than in the iron

sufficient group. " But giving these women daily supplements of iron

for four months reversed this effect.

 

" It was a highly significant improvement, which is really the proof

of the pudding, " he told New Scientist . " If you give iron and

somebody improves you can be pretty sure the iron was causally

related in the first place. "

 

" It certainly fits in with everything we suspect about the impact of

iron on cognitive performance, " says Durhane Wong-Rieger, president

of the Anaemia Institute in Toronto, Canada. " This study may be a

very important step towards not only understanding, but maybe

reversing the situation for iron deficient women. "

 

Malaise and lethargy

 

It is well-documented that iron deficiency may harm cognitive

performance and development in infants, say Beard and Wong-Rieger.

But anecdotal reports of iron deficient young women experiencing

malaise and lethargy prompted the Penn State team to investigate

this age group.

 

They believe their study is the first to show how iron

supplementation can reverse the impact of deficiency on cognitive

performance. The study followed 113 women aged 18 to 35, divided

into three groups. Following World Health Organization guidelines,

women with less than 120 grams/litre haemoglobin in their blood were

classified as anaemic. Those with levels between 120 and 125 g/l

were considered iron deficient, and those exceeding 125g/l were

considered iron sufficient. The team also measured at blood ferritin

levels, an index of iron storage in the blood.

 

Iron deficient women did worse and took longer to complete the

computer-based tasks. But after four weeks, those women taking iron

significantly improved their performance compared to those taking a

placebo. Blood tests confirmed their iron levels had also improved.

 

Anglo-Saxon origins

 

The team believe their work is important because iron deficiency is

very common among women of reproductive age due to blood loss during

heavy menstruation. Beard says about 15 to 18 per cent of US women

in this group are iron deficient - between eight and 10 million

women.

 

However, he cautions that women of Anglo-Saxon origins should not

rush to take iron supplements without proper medical examination.

This is because about one in 20 people of Anglo-Saxon origin carry a

gene for " iron overload " or heredity haemochromatosis.

 

Iron deficiency could have an adverse impact on the brain by

affecting the dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitter systems, Beard

suggests. The results were presented at the Experimental Biology

2004 meeting in Washington DC on Monday.

 

Attilio