The Dangers of Too Much Iron

The "Goldilocks Zone" is many times discussed by astronomers when they look for earth-like planets. They are looking for water in the liquid state on a planet. That planet can't be too close to a star, or else the water will boil off into steam. The planet also can't be too far from the star, since the water will then be in the form of ice.

Human health is also much like this "Goldilocks Zone" concept. If you look at any blood test that you have ever had done, there is a "normal" zone that you should ideally fall in. Being below that zone is considered a deficiency and being above that zone is considered an excess.

Too Much Iron:

Having excess iron in your body is a serious and a much ignored situation,. About one third of adult Americans may have a significant iron excess that could be dangerous to their health.

What complicates this situation, is that many times this excess iron goes undetected. Gerry Koenig is the former chairman of the Iron Disorders Institute and the Hemochromatosis Foundation. The attached link has an interview with him, which illustrates this point. Koenig discusses his personal story about what can happen to someone with excess iron.

Approaching his 50th birthday, Gerry had lost a lot of weight, worked out and felt healthy. By age 55, he was in good shape, but he did drink more than recommended. Eventually, during a physical exam, he found out his liver enzymes were high.

"The doctor recommended I stop drinking," Koenig says. "I stopped drinking. But I got sick again ... Turned out I had hemolytic anemia. My red blood cells were breaking down.

I didn't know what that meant, nor, apparently, did my doctor. They never tested my iron ... Finally I had an episode where I went to the hospital. I had encephalopathy, a pretty serious condition ... They said I would need a new liver.

I didn't get an iron test until the eve of my liver transplant in 2005 ... By chance I ran across a Scientific American article. It described something called hemochromatosis, which I didn't know anything about. I decided I would have the test.

As it turns out, I have a single gene for one of the variants for hemochromatosis, C282Y. Because of that, I decided to look into it more and started researching it ... I've been doing that for the last 11 years."

Many adult men and non-menstruating women have damaging levels of iron. However, the genetic disorder called hemochromatosis, can cause your body to accumulate excessive and dangerously damaging levels of iron.

If left untreated, it can damage your organs and contribute to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases and many other disorders.

The good news is that this excess iron is easy and inexpensive to treat. By monitoring your serum ferritin and gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT) levels, avoiding iron supplements and donating blood on a regular basis, you can avoid serious health problems. It is unfortunate that many people with excessive iron in their body's don't know this.

The serum ferritin test measures your stored iron. Too often, only the serum iron in the blood is tested, which only measures the amount of iron in the blood and not the stored iron in the body, which is only part of the iron story.

Serum ferritin should be tested on an annual basis. "Normal" ranges of serum ferritin vary by lab. According to some labs, a level of 395 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) falls within the normal range, which much too high for optimal health.

Ideally, your serum ferritin should be somewhere between 20 and 80 ng/ml. As a general rule, somewhere between 40 and 60 ng/ml is ideal for adult men and non-menstruating women.

Recent U.S. legislation allows all blood banks to perform therapeutic phlebotomy for hemochromatosis or iron overload. All you need is a doctor's order.

A full iron panel measures serum iron, iron-binding capacity and ferritin.

GGT measures liver enzymes, which can tell you if you have liver damage or consume too much alcohol. It can also be used as a screening marker for excess iron.

For menstruating women, a healthy GGT level is around 9 U/L, whereas the high end of "normal" GGT lab ranges are generally 40 to 45 U/L for women. For men, Koenig recommends a level of 16 U/L (normal lab ranges for men is 65 to 70 U/L).

Read More