Extreme Low Ferritin Levels

So very little. I would recommend a blood test if you think you are anaemic

I was diagnosed in December with anemia from a routine blood test. In the previous blood test (April), I was completely normal. The doctor sent me for a blood transfusion the day I was diagnosed. I felt SOOOoo much better soon thereafter. She has had me tested for many things (bleeding in colon, bleeding in GI tract) and has prescribed iron pills, which have slowly started to work. It is great that they are starting to work, but I would really like to find out why I had this sudden problem. Can you "get" Celiac's disease when you are 51? She is a great doctor and continuing to test, so I will eventually find out...I hope. But again, that blood transfusion was AMAZING, FWIW.

Try vitamin b. I took injections for years to keep my fertin up. If not that then you can recirve IV infusions at the hospital which are amazing.

I was diagnosed with my autoimmune disease (Crohn's) at 38 (but had it for years before misdiagnosed as IBS). Autoimmune diseases can rear their ugly head at any time.

beastmode_kitty wrote: »

Could be. Ive been taking a multivitamin as well but obviously it wasn't doing anything for me. Just grateful I caught this all in time before my ferritin levels went even lower.

One thing to think about, from someone who has been in a similar situation: I would sincerely suggest you take a look at your diet (and by look, I mean look at the nutrients you get from it on a daily/weekly basis), and your multivitamin, and see what your iron intake has been recently. If you aren't sure what you usually eat, a quick food journal for a couple weeks can help you keep track (if it tracks amounts AND food) and then you can go over it and work out how much iron you usually get, you know?

If it's been super, super low, then of course it's obvious why you are low in iron. You add more to your diet, it goes up, and it's all good.

But if it has NOT been super low? IMHO, you should start checking things out.

If you are like most people I know with vitamin deficiency, your doctor has NOT asked you what your diet has been before this. Best I can tell, they just seem to assume automatically that you are not getting enough of the vitamin and give you a prescription of a vitamin supplement. Without actually asking anything about your diet to confirm their assumption. Which is, well, rather stupid, when you think of it, as making a diagnosis OR a medical recommendation based on an unverified assumption (that could be easily verified) is not really in your best interest, you know?

Because if you ARE eating enough of the nutrient, then that means something else is going on that is causing you to be low in this nutrient, but because they never found OUT if you are eating enough of the nutrient, you get to go for longer with the problem still present before it's obvious there is still a problem.

If you DO find you are still low, seriously, I would check your family medical history and see if anything in there can cause low iron levels (in my own history, I had celiac disease in the family, and that was causing low iron in both myself and my daughter. Doctors never had a clue; we had to suggest being tested to them, in the end). If you have any quirky symptoms (like insomnia, aching joints, stomach pain, things like that), you can google them along with iron anemia to see if they match any known conditions. And then go to the doctor and ask about what could cause the problem, because if it's not what you eat, then SOMETHING is going on that is causing this, and I imagine you'd want to know what, yeah?

The reason I mention researching beforehand is because doctors sometimes don't pay attention to your family medical history and might miss a connection there. And also that sometimes, we don't mention symptoms because we don't think they are a big deal, when sometimes they are important and relevant to the nutrient deficiency and the doctor needs to know about them. Research ahead of time can help us determine better that we need to mention some symptoms, you know?