Anaemia - Iron Deficiency
Uploaded by mumsa1 on May 10, 2012
Anaemia is more common in women.
In this article:
What is anaemia?
Symptoms
Causes
Diagnosis
Treatment
How Chemist Online can help
What is anaemia?
When your blood is unable to carry enough oxygen around your body, anaemia can develop. The deficiency in the oxygen carriage is due to there being too few red blood cells being generated by your body, or through some abnormality with these cells. When this occurs there can be the onset of a range of symptoms.
Symptoms
Symptoms of anaemia include:
Headaches
Breathlessness
Pallid complexion
Dizzy spells, bouts of faintness and overwhelming fatigue
An overall feeling of lethargy and a loss of interest in activities that you would normally enjoy
Increased heart-rate and sometimes heart palpitations
Sore throat, mouth, tongue and gums
Brittle nails
Tinnitus
An inability to taste food and drink as normal
Difficulty swallowing
Weight-loss
Causes
As well as iron deficiency anaemia, there are four other ‘main’ types of anaemia:
Pernicious anaemia – where not enough Vitamin B12 is absorbed by your body from the food that you eat.
Megaloblastic anaemia – also due to a lack of Vitamin B12 as well as your body being unable to absorb sufficient amounts of Folic Acid. With this form of anaemia, your red blood cells are abnormally large.
Haemolytic anaemia – where the blood cells break down and trigger a range of unpleasant symptoms.
Aplastic anaemia – when your bone marrow fails to produce enough red blood cells, Aplastic anaemia develops. This is a rare condition.
This article will focus upon iron deficiency anaemia: the most common type of anaemia and a condition that affects thousands of people across the UK. In fact, iron deficiency anaemia affects up to a third of the world’s population – a staggering statistic.
Iron deficiency anaemia is caused by your body struggling to cope with a lack of iron. This loss of iron can be due to your body losing blood (during a woman’s menstrual cycle, for example) and also after sudden weight-loss. For some people, the development of iron deficiency anaemia can be caused by a serious disease, such as cancer.
Diagnosis
If you are experiencing the aforementioned symptoms and associated symptoms of anaemia, or you think you may have a genetic predisposition to having the condition, (that is, it is already in the family and may have been passed down), then arrange to see your GP.
After taking your medical history and asking you some questions about your symptoms (such as when and how often they occur and if they would appear to happen as a result of certain triggers),...