Iron

[Hoochybaby]

Hi I had a blood test recently for my rls my neurologist said I may be low on iron I got the results today and I was told my Ferritin reading was 224 my iron 8.4 and my B12 686 can anyone interpret these results because they mean nothing to me!

[Hidden]

Hi again.

Your ferritin is looking good, no actual deficiency there. "Normal" is anything above 15ug/L. It's recomended that for someone with RLS it should be at least 50, 75 or 100ug/L depending on where you read it.

50% of RLS sufferers with a ferritin of less than 100 benefit from raising it to 100.

Some RLS experts say it should be 300, but yours looks OK really.

Your vit B12 looks OK if that's in ng/mL. The unit is important because depending on what unit it's reported in may change what number is normal. In the US different units tend to be used than in Europe.

I'm not sure about iron, is this serum iron ir haemoglobin? Also what units is that in?

Serum iron is between 76 and 198 ug/dL, so I don't think it's that.

Heamoglobin in theUK is measured in g/dL.

What's normal depends on gender and age, but the minimum for any gender, any age is 11g/dL.

So if your "iron" is haemoglobin measured in g/dL, you have iron deficiency anaemia, which causes RLS.

[Hoochybaby in reply to Hidden]

Thank you Manerva for your reply . I have a phone consultation with my Neurologist at the end of this month so I’ll see what she has to say.

I have been taking Pregabalin for a few months now and it seemed to be ok at first but now I’m back to square one with my rls

[Hidden in reply to Hoochybaby]

As I wrote if it's your haemoglobin and it's only 8.4g/dL then you are quite anaemic. Perhaps it will be worthwhile contacting your GP and check this result. If this is correct then it's probably advisable to start taking iron a.s.a.p.

I say IF, because I would expect other symptoms of anaemia with a Hb that low. However, I can't see anything else other than Hb which would result in a number like that.

The other iron tests are serum iron, transferrin and ferritin and none of the numbers for those come near 8.4