Abstract
Dietary iron deficiency (ID) is the first nutritional deficiency in the world, in terms of disability adjusted life years (DALY). This nutritional deficiency may lead to anemia, especially among children, adolescents, and adult women. The aim of this study was to build an original probabilistic model to quantitatively assess the ID, the iron deficiency anemia (IDA) and the subsequent health burden in France expressed in DALY, per age class and gender. The model considered the distribution of absorbed iron intake, the iron requirement distribution established by the European Food Safety Authority and the iron status in France. Uncertainty due to lack of data and variability due to biological diversity were taken into account and separated using a second-order Monte Carlo procedure. A total of 1290 (95% CI = 1230–1350) IDA cases corresponding to 16 (95% CI = 11–20) DALY were estimated per 100,000 individuals per year. The major contributors to IDA burden were menstruating females aged from 25 to 44 years old. Then, a consumption scenario was built with ground beef as intake, an increase in red meat consumption to 100 g/d would not eliminate entirely the IDA burden. The quantitative methodology applied here for France could be reused for other populations.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that around two billion people were anemic in the world, which makes this disease one of the most common nutrition disorders [1]
The burden of iron deficiency anemia (IDA) in male adults was already low, but the consumption of 50 g/d or 100 g/d of red meat, in addition to the other sources of iron in current diet, would decrease the current number of disability adjusted life years (DALY) from 0.8 [95% CI = 0.3–1.4] and 0.2 [95% CI = 0.1–0.4] per 100,000 individuals per year, respectively
Twenty-two percent of older adolescent females were identified with IDA in our study, which was higher than the results found in 1994 in France (7.4% for adolescents aged from 14 to 18) [24,34]
Summary
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that around two billion people were anemic in the world, which makes this disease one of the most common nutrition disorders [1]. ID was estimated to represent over than 60% of the anemia causes [4,5], especially among the younger population [4,6]. This nutritional deficiency—commonly defined as serum ferritin level on blood ≤30 μg/L [7,8]—has several consequences for human health, such as a delay in children’s mental and physical development, a decrease in work productivity, intelligence or cognitive capacity [1,9]
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