TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092192/09219925.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 1.7 KB | 39 lines

                                                                                THE WEEK  

HEALTH & SCIENCE, Page 18

Now It's Iron


Too much of the metal could be a major factor in heart attacks


    Dr. Jerome Sullivan told you so. More than a decade ago, the
South Carolina medical researcher came up with a theory
explaining why young women rarely have heart attacks. It isn't
that they are protected by the hormone estrogen, as conventional
wisdom had it, said Sullivan, but that they lose iron every
month during menstrual bleeding. And iron, he believed, promotes
heart attacks. Now a study from Finland, published in the
American Heart Association journal Circulation, has provided
strong evidence that he was right.

     Nearly 2,000 Finnish men between the ages of 42 and 60,
with no obvious evidence of heart disease, were monitored from
1984 through 1989; 51 ended up with heart attacks. It turned
out that the second strongest risk factor, after smoking, was
the blood level of a protein called ferritin -- and ferritin is a
good indicator of overall iron levels. For each 1% increase of
blood ferritin, there was more than a 4% increase in
heart-attack risk. A ferritin level of 200 or more, compared
with the normal 100 to 150, doubled the risk. The mechanism is
unclear, but iron may contribute directly to heart-tissue damage
as well as trigger the formation of artery-clogging plaques. If
further studies bear out this result, it could explain not only
the lower heart-attack rate in young women but also why eating
meat can be dangerous (it's full of iron) and why aspirin can
be a preventive (it can cause mild internal bleeding).