Indications:
Doser ferritin to estimate the amount of iron stored in the body in the case of anemia or more generally of a chronic fatigue.
Principle:
Abundant in liver and macrophages, ferritin’s iron storage protein. Mainly intracellular, however, it is present in the plasma, but in small quantities.
A correlation exists between ferritin and iron stores in the body.
Technique:
Sampling 5 mL of blood in a dry tube or anticoagulant.
The need to be fasting is absolute, because too much presence of lipids disrupts the dosage.
This is done by radioimmunoassay or enzyme immunoassay method.
Results:
A wide variety of usual values exist.
Normal values:
– Women: 30 to 150 g / L;
– Man: 60 to 300 g / L;
– Children: the results are very low in the first year.
Pathological changes:
– A hypoferritinemia is a sign of iron deficiency in the context of a deficiency anemia, unlike anemia of inflammation, where the serum ferritin is greater than 150 g / L;
– Ferritin is found in cases of:
– Hemochromatosis,
– Certain cancers: liver, lung and kidney,
– Elevated liver enzymes,
– Inflammatory anemia.
Cost:
B70.
Practical advice:
Falsely low values of serum ferritin may be due to a serum hemolysis.
Falsely high, they may come from a lipid-rich serum.
