Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastrointest Pharmacol Ther. Feb 6, 2016; 7(1): 139-144
Published online Feb 6, 2016. doi: 10.4292/wjgpt.v7.i1.139
Under-diagnosing and under-treating iron deficiency in hospitalized patients with gastrointestinal bleeding
Mustapha M El-Halabi, Michael S Green, Christopher Jones, William J Salyers Jr
Mustapha M El-Halabi, Michael S Green, Christopher Jones, William J Salyers Jr, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Kansas School of Medicine - Wichita, Wichita, KS 67214, United States
William J Salyers Jr, Division of Gastroenterology, University of Kansas School of Medicine - Wichita, Wichita, KS 67214, United States
Author contributions: Salyers Jr WJ was the guarantor of the study and contributed study idea and conception; El-Halabi MM and Salyers Jr WJ designed the study; El-Halabi MM, Green MS and Jones C acquired data; El-Halabi MM, Green MS, Jones C and Salyers Jr WJ analyzed and interpreted data; El-Halabi MM drafted the manuscript; Green MS, Jones C and Salyers Jr WJ revised the manuscript and appraised it critically for important intellectual content; all authors approved the final version of the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita Institutional Review Board and by the Via Christi Hospital Institutional Review Board.
Informed consent statement: Informed consents were not obtained from the patients. The IRB waived the need for informed consents based on the fact that our study was a minimal risk retrospective chart review study.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this article.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: William J Salyers Jr, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Head, Program Director, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Kansas School of Medicine - Wichita, 1010 N. Kansas, Wichita, KS 67214, United States. wsalyers@kumc.edu
Telephone: +1-316-2932650 Fax: +1-316-2931878
Received: July 13, 2015
Peer-review started: July 15, 2015
First decision: November 11, 2015
Revised: November 27, 2015
Accepted: December 29, 2015
Article in press: January 4, 2016
Published online: February 6, 2016
Processing time: 198 Days and 23.9 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) is under-diagnosed and under treated in hospitalized gastrointestinal (GI) bleeders. Less than a third of our patients had evaluation of their anemia to detect IDA. Around half of these investigated patients had lab proven IDA. Less than two thirds of those patients with proven IDA received iron supplementation, which means that IDA was either under-recognized or disregarded on purpose. In an attempt to understand the reasoning of physicians leading to this discrepancy, we analyzed predictors of checking iron studies on these hospitalized GI bleeders and the main predictors were lower mean corpuscular volume and early documentation of anemia in the chart.