Extra iron doesn’t help many pregnant women.

ALTHOUGH universal prenatal benefit
pregnant women, except when they are
anemic. According to a study published in
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,
the researchers of the Institute of Tropical
Medicine Antwerp and colleagues who
followed more than a thousand pregnant
women in Burkina Faso.
Our body needs iron to produce
hemoglobin, the substance in our red blood
cells responsible for the transport of
oxygen through our body. In Western
countries anemia a shortage of oxygen
transporters is rare, but in Africa up to half
of all women are anemic. Of the 1268
pregnant women in this study, 43 per cent
was anemic.
Half of those women received daily pills
with 60 milligrams of iron (plus folic acid);
the other half received 30 mg of iron (plus
folic acid, zinc, vitamins A and C and other
micronutrients). Chance decided who got
what. The women took the pills until three
months after delivery. At the end of the
study, all women ended up with about the
same levels of iron in their blood, regardless
of how much iron they had taken. They all
had around 11 grams of hemoglobin per
deciliter of blood, says slightly below
normal.
During pregnancy, when also the growing
child needs oxygen, women need more iron
than normally, certainly towards the end of
their pregnancy. But the administration of
extra iron to the ‘normal’ women could not
prevent their hemoglobin levels from
(slightly) dropping. “The benefit of iron
supplements in no anemic women is
unclear, ” the authors conclude in The
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
In Africa, where many people are
malnourished, an where parasites also take
their part, many women suffer from iron-
poor blood. That of course has to be
supplemented. In anemic women the pills
made the iron levels go up, to the same level
as the other pregnant women: a bit below
normal.