PHA-Exchange> No drugs to treat anaemia - a study from India (2)

[Claudio]

From: Misha Kogan 
I would not have selected this superficial article for sending to the group.

While it is true that adding other vitamins (except Vitamin C) will probably not lead to correcting anemia any faster than just with Iron (and without folate) many people in Africa do have B12 deficiencies, as well as Zinc etc.  Self cost of almost all vitamins (with exceptions of CoQ10, some chelated formulation like Niferex) is very cheap.   The most amount of money spend on simple vitamins is marketing, packaging, delivery, the actual cost of ingredients is minimal.

Of course pharm companies always try to inflate prices to increase profits.  However, that was not the main point of the article. It was arguing that many formulation are "unscientific" or even harmful.

The word unscientific is based on the fact that many of this vitamins are not studied for an obvious reason no big pharm will ever invest money into supplements as it is much less profitable than developing and patenting medications.

One blunt mistake that any medical student who just passed Biochemistry will pick up is that Vitamin C is vital for Inorganic Iron absorption as it oxidizes iron and allows transport accros cellular membrane by transport protein.  That is why heme iron in meat is much more bioavailable than say iron from spinach.  That is why cooked spinach (Vitamin C is temperature sensitive) has very minimal amount of bioavailable iron.  
When studies done in USA or Europe compared Iron and Iron plus Vit C no difference was found because in well developed countries vitamin C reach foods are common and more over many foods like cereals are supplemented.  I don't know if similar studies were done in poor contries.  Word textbook is very amuzing in this context as any MD knows that any textbook is usually 5-6 years out of date. 

Anyway, just my tokien on poorly thought and written article in my opinion.
I'll try to look into whole 56 page document if I have time.

Thanks
Misha Kogan, MD
PGY3 Internal/Social Medicine Residency Program
Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx NY


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