Cellular Sensitivity to Ferrotoxicity is Associated with Specific Clinical Disorders

Abstract

Copyright: © 2014 Weinberg ED. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. During the past five decades, scores of medical studies have described the association of ferrotoxicity with development of a great variety of diseases [1]. Increasingly, specific types of body cells are being reported to be injured or killed by low concentrations of iron. In the initial account, cultures of anterior pituitary cells were observed to be killed by 2 μM irons; in this system, hepatocytes remained healthy in 10-100 μM iron [2]. Thus not surprisingly, thalassemic-major children who load iron early in life are deprived of growth hormone. Persons who absorb excessive iron in late teens or early adulthood can suffer from low levels of gonadotrophic hormones. Subsequently, osteoblasts have been recognized to be unusually sensitive to low concentrations of iron [3,4]. In contrast, osteoclasts (cells of macrophage origin) are highly resistant to iron. Thus in iron loaded persons, bone rebuilding by osteoblasts is surpassed by osteoclast destruction of bone. Accordingly, osteoporosis is a common disorder in patients who load iron for genetic, environmental or behavioral reasons [5].