Jerome J. Federspiel, MD, often cares for patients who are about to deliver a baby but who have untreated iron deficiency anemia (IDA). Often, these patients require a blood transfusion after giving birth.
"I am sad to hear commonly from patients we treat that they have had iron-deficient anemia symptoms for many years. Correcting these conditions makes birth safer and, oftentimes, makes people feel much better — sometimes better than they have in years," Federspiel maternal fetal medicine physician and assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and population health sciences at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, said.
Even for patients who he is able to diagnose earlier, they "will have difficulties catching up during pregnancy."
The condition is the most common type of anemia among people who are pregnant. IDA increases a patient's risk of delivering preterm and developing postpartum depression and puts their infants at a risk for perinatal mortality. Without proper treatment of IDA throughout pregnancy, the condition can also lead to low birth weights in infants or failing to meet weight goals later on.
But of all women with a new diagnosis of IDA from 2021 to 2022, 10% were pregnantaccording to an analysis by Komodo Health, a healthcare analytics company.
