Effect of twice weekly versus daily iron treatment in Turkish children with iron deficiency anemia

This study was designed to propose a more practical, effective, safer, inexpensive, and manageable alternative treatment of iron deficiency anemia (IDA) for the developing countries. The study involves 94 children between the ages of 5 months and 6 years who had been seen in the authors' hospital and diagnosed as having iron deficiency anemia. Ninety-four children with IDA were randomly divided into two groups: 48 children comprised the first group, which was administered conventional treatment, and 46 children comprised the second group, which was administered intermittent treatment involving iron administration 2 days a week. Twenty-three children whose age and gender distribution were compatible with the other groups were included in the study as the control group. Both groups were reevaluated for their initial hematologic parameters at the end of the treatment. When the parameters of both groups were compared with the parameters of the control group after the treatment, there were no differences between hemoglobin, hematocrit, red blood cell, mean corpuscular volume, mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration, serum iron, and ferritin levels of conventional and intermittent treatment groups. With respect to certain parameters, such as red cell distribution, serum iron binding capacity, transferrin saturation, transferrin receptor, and transferrin receptor/log ferritin, however, intermittent treatment was superior to the conventional treatment method (p<.05). In IDA, when a conventional treatment method or an intermittent treatment method is used, there are no differences between the hematological parameters. In fact, the intermittent treatment method has been found to be superior in many parameters.