How far d o serum ferritin scores vary naturally ?

[thorp]

I have suffered for years with RLS. So my serum ferritin is measured regularly

My serum ferritin scores recently have been as follows

20 july 85

13 august 115

24 sept 130

15 oct 178

No iron tablets taken, diet did not change ;nothing changed .

So why is my serum ferritin improving?

If these kind of natural variations can occur ,of what use are serum ferritin measures?

[Madlegs1]

Ferritin is affected by inflammation.Therefore, if you body comes under major stress or after such event, then the ferritin will be affected.

Your results are not majorly variable and might reflect daily variations and minor inflammation events.

Serum ferritin is significant for only about 50% of rls sufferers.

The Iron Disorders Institute is a good source of information for all matters iron.

[Elffindoe]

Part of the answer is that serum ferritin measures are actually pretty useless, but they're the best there is.

A better measure would to be directly measure brain iron levels. Doing this however, is either very expensive, very risky or would result in your death.

The other part is as Mr Legs says, inflammation.

[Graham3196]

My ferritin levels are much more constant if I change nothing but your ferritin concentration is showing a consistent increase. You'll have us all waiting anxiously to see what you reach in November! We can probably assume that the figures you quote are accurate on the day but perhaps there is something gradually increasing inflammation in your body. Have you discussed this with your doctor? Intuitively you would think a trend like this must mean something. Whatever the cause of the variation we can say that your ferritin is low for an RLS patient and you should start campaigning for an intra-venous iron infusion aimed to increase your ferritin to about 350. You need to do this with your doctors supervision but dont let the doctor talk you out of it. I say campaigning because in some parts of the world it takes a lot of time to find a doctor who will give you an infusion for any reason other than anemia. Its just the rules they have to work to.

Some other factors to consider are

Fast for the 10 hours before your sample. In Australia about half the doctors I have seen say fasting is not required and the other half say it is so I choose fasting. Partly because in the US all the "experts" seem to agree on fasting. Drink at least a litre of water of water because it's said that this makes it easier to find a vein.

Always get the blood test at the same laboratory. A Path lab told me that low ferritin levels are difficult to measure accurately and that different machines measure significantly different concentrations because there are two (or more) techniques used to determine the amount of ferritin and they can give different results. They said that the measurement variability has been getting attention over the last few years and is improving but perhaps the process is sensitive to some characteristic of your blood.