Iron is also involved with the body's defense system: pathogens need iron to survive, and hypoferremia has bee hypothesized to be a reactive response to reduce infectious disease. However, the exact relationship between iron and infectious disease is poorly understood at present.
Certain populations are more at risk for IDA and hypoferremia, such as women of childbearing age, children, and those living in longterm poverty (Mansen and McCance, 805). IDA and hyperferremia are more common in females than males in the United States, IDA occurring in four to six percent of females and hypoferremia occurring in 13.9 percent of females. For males the incidence rates are four percent for IDA and 8.3 percent for hyperferremia. The incidences peak for females during the childbearing years and rates decline after menopause. In males, the peaks occur during childhood and adolescence, with a decrease during young childhood and an increase during late adulthood. Children below two years of age are often affected because of the need for extra iron during growth. Those at highest risk are Black females living in urban poverty.
Internationally, the prdvalence of IDA depends primarily on the dietary intake of meat, being higher, around six to 8 times as frequent as in the United States, in countries where there is little meat in the diet (Conrad, 2004). This is in spite of the fact that a diet containing an equivalent amount of total dietary iron is consumed because heme iron is absorbed better than non-heme iron. Vegetarians, because they don't eat meat, are at greater risk of IDA because the iron they get from grains and vegetables isn't absorbed as well as that from meat (MayoClinic, 2005. In some geographical areas, gastrointestinal parasites such as hookworm make the iron deficiency more critical because of the blood loss from the gastrointestinal tract they cause. IDA is more profound among children and premenopausal women in ...