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Iron and Heart Disease: A Review of the Epidemiologic Data

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Iron Deficiency and Overload

Part of the book series: Nutrition and Health ((NH))

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Summary

• In 1981, Dr. Jerome Sullivan proposed the hypothesis that the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) increases in a positive fashion as body iron stores increase.

• Serum ferritin and other less precise measures of body iron stores have been used in those studies to test the hypothesis.

• Serum ferritin was not significantly related to risk of developing CHD in the vast majority of the observational cohort studies, case-control, or cross-sectional studies.

• In an underpowered clinical trial, those receiving phlebotomy to lower body stores of iron did not have a significantly lower risk of death from all causes (primary endpoint) or of death plus non-fatal heart attack or stroke compared to controls.

• The presence of the Cys282Tyr mutation, which accounts for most of the cases of hemochromatosis, was not found to be associated with CHD risk in two meta-analysis studies.

• At present, the vast majority of the epidemiological data does not support the hypothesis that body iron stores are directly related to the risk of developing CHD.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The findings and conclusions in this chapter are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, or the US Department of Health and Human Services.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Office of Dietary Supplements, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Christopher T. Sempos

  2. National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Hyattsville, MD, USA

    Anne C. Looker

  3. Department of Statistics, College of Arts and Sciences, , Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Daniel L. McGee

  4. Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Jürgen Rehm

Authors
  1. Christopher T. Sempos
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  2. Anne C. Looker
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  3. Daniel L. McGee
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  4. Jürgen Rehm
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Psychology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel

    Shlomo Yehuda

  2. Dept. Psychology, Boston University, Cummington St. 64, Boston, 02215-2407, USA

    David I. Mostofsky

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© 2009 Humana Press, a part of Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Sempos, C.T., Looker, A.C., McGee, D.L., Rehm, J. (2009). Iron and Heart Disease: A Review of the Epidemiologic Data. In: Yehuda, S., Mostofsky, D. (eds) Iron Deficiency and Overload. Nutrition and Health. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-462-9_16

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