MEDICAL RESEARCH

Hokitika Guardian, 17 September 1931, Page 3

MEDICAL RESEARCH

WOMAN DOCTOR’S INVESTIGATIONS. IRON TREATMENT FOR ANAEMIA. J •LONDON, July 31-. During the past' five years Dr Helen M. M. Mackay and her colleagues at the Queen’s Hospital for : Children, in the East End, have been studying a group of diseases affecting infants, and they have arrived at the conclusion that anaemic infants have a proneness to disease twice as great as those who are given phophylactic by iron. One of Dr Mackay’s chief helpers has been Mr Lorel Goodfellow. “Nutritional Anaemia in Infancy, with Special Reference to Iron Deficiency,” is the title of her report, which has been issued by the Medical Research Council.

Two groups of infants, as evenly matched as possible, were kept under observation, one group being given iron and ammonium citrate (iron salt), and the other used as controls.

“The most striking and most important effect of routine iron medication was the diminution of illness.” states the report. Iron treatment approximately halved the morbidity rate both for diseases of the respiratory and of the gastro-intestinal tract.

TWO GROUPS COMPARED. A comparison of gain in weight in the two groups revealed the fact that all infants of the iron group who had three months or more of treatment averaged over one prtund more in weight -than those in the control group. In the age group most likely to suffer from iron deficiency, the superiority in weight of treated cases was still more striking, the iron cases, after three months’ treatment, weighing approximately two and two and a-half pounds heavier than the controls.

Dr Mackay concludes from her study of nearly 1100 infairEs that there is prevalent a definite type of anaemia, which is due to the inadequate supply of iron, and to a less extent, possibly, of copper salts. This does not. seem to be duo to any deleterious effect of v cows’ milk, or to any of its constituents; the same type of anaemia was found to occur in . breast-fed infants. The bottle-fed baby can be speedily cured by the addition of a suitable quantity of iron salts to the milk without any other change in the diet. Rickets and vitamin deficiency were proved not to be concerned in the

development of the anaemia. Summing up, the investigator states: “Tt may therefore be asserted that 'treatment of infants in their own homes with iron and ammonium citrate, prevented the cured anaemia, raised the resistance to infection, thereby greatly reducing the morbidity rate, and considerably improving the rate of growth.”

BETTER HYGTEiNIO CONDITIONS. In an introduction tile Medical Research Council state that before the war girls suffered from “green sickness,” or chlorosis, due to deficiency in haemoglobin, the iron containing compound that gives redness to the blood were a common sight in London. The sufferers numbered thousands, but after the war this form of anaemia utterly vanished. “Changes in the environment of life and the achievement by working women and better hygienic conditions, including higher wages and better habits of exercise and of dress, have automatically banished the disease. This is

an important and sudden event in social ,history that has attracted too little attention. Dr Mackay’s report shows that a not dissimilar anaemia still persists widespread among infants in London, and that there is still a group of illnesses in infancy directly associated with anaemia and readily curable by the simple method of adding iron (perhaps also with infinitesimal quantities of copper and manganese) to the milk diet.”