Heart Disease
While a person’s primary care provider will check their iron levels, there are many reasons their iron could drop to an unhealthy level. The most common is heart disease and a low-iron diet. If they have heart disease, their body may require more oxygen to support the heart muscle, so it demands more iron.
In addition, if they eat a diet that doesn’t include red meat or other iron-rich foods, they can become deficient. Other causes of low iron include a parasitic infection like giardia or hookworm, which both cause diarrhea and, therefore, loss of iron in the digestive tract. Rarer causes of low iron include blood loss from internal bleeding or heavy periods, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, celiac disease, and other inflammatory bowel diseases.
It has been found that people with low iron stores are more likely to have higher levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in their blood than people with regular iron stores. These fats can build up in the arteries over time, causing atherosclerosis, the leading cause of coronary heart disease (CHD).
A study showed the association between low iron stores and CHD risk is independent of other dietary factors such as body mass index (BMI), gender, or smoking status. However, it did not reach statistical significance due to the small sample sizes. Another study showed that women with high baseline ferritin levels were less likely to develop diabetes mellitus during follow-up than those with lower baseline ferritin levels. However, this association was not statistically significant after adjusting for covariates such as BMI gain or waist circumference change.
