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A Swedish study suggests that many women have sub-optimal levels of haemoglobin in their blood, causing them to have difficulty walking short distances and climbing stairs. How often have you gone to the doctor's to be told don't worry it's nothing.... and you've been left uncertain that the reassurance was well founded? Well it seems, from preliminary research findings, that a test result widely accepted to be in the healthy range might not be so normal for older people. I'm talking about the haemoglobin level. Haemoglobin carries oxygen and if it's low we're said to be anaemic. Older people often have haemoglobins which don't quite qualify as anaemia or are just on the low side and no-one does anything about it. Well a study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which investigated 1000 women aged over 65, suggests otherwise. They found that within the normal range of haemoglobin, between 12 and 14, there was a remarkable difference in the levels of disability. Women with a haemoglobin of 12 had double the risk of difficulties walking short distances and climbing stairs. And if their haemoglobin was 10 the risk was quadrupled compared to those at 14. The analysis, by the way, tried to remove the people who had underlying disease as the explanation. The unanswered question is whether it's cause and effect and whether taking iron to boost the haemoglobin would make a difference.
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