Ferroxidases and Ferrireductases: Their Role in Iron Metabolism

Abstract

The metal most precious to man is iron, not gold. Man can survive without gold, but without iron in his diet he soon loses his capacity to carry and to utilize oxygen and his metabolism grinds to a deadly halt. This need of iron for essential biological processes is not exclusive to man, but is found throughout nature, in plants, insects, fish, birds and bacteria. Despite his desperate need for iron the human being is relatively poorly equipped to capture iron from his food. Even in iron deficiency, only a small proportion of dietary iron is absorbed. Once absorbed, iron is carefully conserved and the amount of iron lost by excretion is extremely low. In spite of this the absorption of iron frequently cannot keep pace with the organism’s need for it, especially in crucial periods of life. Even in our relatively overfed society in the United States, iron deficiency may appear as a nutritional disease. It has been estimated by Dr. Louis K. Diamond (1971) of the Univ. of California School of Medicine (San Francisco) that at least 5,000,000 Americans suffer some degree of physical or mental impairment due to iron deficiency. Recent surveys in some under-developed tropical countries revealed moderate to severe anemia, responsive to iron therapy, in more than 50 percent of the women examined. Thus, if we extrapolate from our relatively well fed society to the underfed areas of the world, the number of iron deficient individuals must surely be in the hundreds of millions.