Alopecia and Iron Deficiency: An Interventional Pilot Study in Primary Care to Improve the Request of Ferritin

    August 2020 in “ Advances in Hematology ”
    María Salinas, María Leiva-Salinas, Emilio Flores, Maite López‐Garrigós, Carlos Leiva‐Salinas
    TLDR Automatically measuring ferritin can help identify iron deficiency in women with hair loss.
    The study conducted at a community hospital in Spain aimed to improve the diagnosis of iron deficiency in alopecia patients by automatically registering ferritin tests. It included retrospective and prospective studies, analyzing 343 and 1,032 laboratory requests, respectively. Findings showed that while anemia was present in 5.8% of patients, iron deficiency was more common, affecting 24.2% in the retrospective and 25.9% in the prospective study. An intervention automatically registered 123 ferritin tests, identifying iron deficiency in 19.5% of cases, all in women, at a cost of 10.6€ per detected case. The study emphasized the importance of ferritin testing in diagnosing iron deficiency in women with alopecia, despite limitations such as the inability to analyze different alopecia types and potential selection bias.
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