ReviewDiagnostics (Basel, Switzerland)2025
Defining Global Thresholds for Serum Ferritin: A Challenging Mission in Establishing the Iron Deficiency Diagnosis in This Era of Striving for Health Equity.
Review in Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Management of iron deficiency anemia and the role of intravenous iron supplementation in patients undergoing cancer chemotherapy: a real-world retrospective study in Japan.International journal of clinical oncology · 2026Observational
- Article
- The Role of Reticulocyte-Derived Parameters in the Detection of Iron-Restricted Erythropoiesis in the Elderly.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Advances in Laboratory Diagnosis.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Establishment and Validation of Serum Ferritin Reference Intervals Based on Real-World Big Data and Multi-Strategy Partitioning Algorithms.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Article
- Anemia, iron deficiency, and blood biomarkers for Alzheimer disease: clinical interpretation and dementia risk stratification.Frontiers in nutrition · 2026Review
- Functional alterations of neutrophils from β-thalassemia patients exposed to Pythium insidiosum: An ex vivo study.PloS one · 2026Article
- Iron Deficiency Diagnosis in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges, Barriers, and Opportunities.Anemia · 2026Review
- Prevalence of heavy menstrual bleeding, iron deficiency, iron deficiency anemia, and treatment in women with von Willebrand disease-a cohort study.Research and practice in thrombosis and haemostasis · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Iron deficiency (ID) is a critical public health issue globally and the most prevalent cause of anemia. Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) affects approximately 1.2 billion individuals worldwide, and it is estimated that non-anemic iron deficiency (NAID) is at least twice as common as IDA. Yet, there is still uncertainty about how to diagnose it in clinical practice. The serum ferritin (SF) threshold of <15 ng/mL proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) has been questioned over the last decade. The current SF thresholds are inappropriately low, and, therefore, a large portion of the population at the most significant risk of ID remain undiagnosed and untreated. The correlation between SF, hepcidin, and the physiological upregulation of iron absorption in healthy adults suggests that SF of <50 ng/mL indicates a more precise threshold for diagnosing ID in adults. Therefore, adopting the SF threshold <50 ng/mL would break up the perpetuation of an inequitable cycle of disadvantage for ID individuals, especially among women.
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