3 replies to this topic

[stephen_b]

I found this interesting article by a high school track coach. He found ferritin depletion common among his athletes, particularly girls.

Iron is lost through sweat and gastrointestinal irritation. It is temporarily lost through "footstrike hemolysis" (bursting blood cells through foot impact with the ground). ... While iron depletion rarely results in the general lethargy associated with true iron-deficiency anemia, distance runners with low ferritin will likely experience abnormal exhaustion, increased blood lactate, slow recovery, declining performances, heavy legs, muscular tightness, loss of motivation, and substantially increased risk of injury ...

Overuse injuries (the type of injuries distance runners get) double with ferritin levels under 20 and triple with levels under 12. I think it's safe to suggest that iron depletion is rarely considered to be the root cause of these injuries. Instead we focus on mileage, running surfaces, shoes and the other usual suspects. If you were nodding your head thinking the previous symptoms sound like a checklist of your most recent season, go get your serum ferritin tested.

Very interesting to me. I've been running half marathon distances and have a ferritin level of 22.

StephenB

[StrangeAeons]

Came across this information (via a number of studies) while researching my own iron deficiency (ferritin level of 5). For the record I'm terrible at endurance excercise. I think the gist is that you stress RBC's more via this type of workout and thus expedite haemolysis/hematopoesis. Equally interesting, in studies where they've tested athletes they've found that improvements in iron led to improvements in performance independently of oxygenation status.

22 is pretty low, especially for a guy; what I'm curious about is how this affects your serum Fe and TIBC (and therefore sats). Evdiently my GI only deemed parenteral repletion to be safe if the % saturation was low. You might consider this if oral repletion takes way too long.

[stephen_b]

22 is pretty low, especially for a guy; what I'm curious about is how this affects your serum Fe and TIBC (and therefore sats). Evdiently my GI only deemed parenteral repletion to be safe if the % saturation was low. You might consider this if oral repletion takes way too long.

Actually, my serum iron was quite high at 199 ug/dL. I don't think I've had TIBC measured.

I'm trying something a bit different with iron supplementation. I'm taking iron depleted lactoferrin (apolactoferrin from LEF) with NOW's ferrochel iron bisglycinate. Lactoferrin is the body's way of playing keep away with iron from gut pathogens. My thought is that the apolactoferrin will take up the iron and be taken up by my digestive system.

I think that ferritin is another substance (along with vitamin D) that I'm going to have to get regularly measured.

StephenB

[StrangeAeons]

Per my understanding, serum iron reflects more immediate iron status. If this lab was drawn after supplementation or an iron-heavy meal you might want to cut down on it to avoid oxidative stress from high serum iron. This is all conjecture, though.
I'm not too familiar with apolactoferrin, but it appears that it's a form of transferrin; I believe that iron-depleted transferrins is what they look at when they do a TIBC, so you might want to avoid taking it (or at least let them know) before drawing that particular lab; in that same vein, though --har har-- I would think that apolactoferrin would bind to your serum iron and thus drive it down; which is a good think in this case. Again, conjecture.