What Causes Iron Levels To Be High?

Are you wondering what causes iron levels to be high, hemochromatosis, or too much iron? Maybe you were told you have high iron and you don't really know what that means. there are different ways to measure iron and so we are going to talk about testing as well as hemochromatosis, iron testing and optimal iron levels. If you're curious about the causes of high iron and some of the things you should be thinking about when this comes up in your health scenario keep watching we are gonna get into the details okay so what causes iron levels to be high so first let's define a little bit what we mean by iron levels to begin with because there's a few different ways that people talk about iron and iron levels so one way we can measure iron is through serum iron so this is just kind of what's floating around in your blood and then and it's more free and ready to be used then there's also this other form called stored iron called ferritin and that's more as it sounds a storage form of iron and then there's a there's another way that's kind of more of a surrogate marker for iron it's not actually iron but it contains iron in that's hemoglobin so hemoglobin is a molecule that helps your body transport oxygen and in order to make hemoglobin you need iron so iron is a core part of that and so often times when they say iron and hemoglobin they're used interchangeably but for this for this video we are gonna exclude hemoglobin as part of the the idea of what we are talking about as high iron so we are talking about high serum iron and high ferritin now and specifically we are gonna look more so at the ferritin and it's important to know too that there's different levels that are normal for iron levels for males and females and for ferritin for females the range goes from about eleven to two hundred or 230 and for males it goes from about 25 to 500 now that's a big range and so when we talk about high iron levels there's two ways to think about this and the two ways thing about it is like extremely high iron like above the normal range and then there's oh optimal ranges so for the purpose of this we are going to be talking about both of those and if you have a ferritin level on your female above 200 I would say that's pretty high and you there are a few things you should be thinking about for that and they're not too much different for the males so for a male if they have a ferritin that's above 500 there are a few things you should be thinking about so one of those things is called hemochromatosis so hemochromatosis is an abnormal absorption of iron through the digestive tract and when you when that happens you tend to accumulate more iron for females this probably is not going to happen if you're having normal menstrual cycles but it still can it's just more common when you go after you go through the menopause for this to to creep up for males it can happen it can show up in in your mid till to later years because it does take a while for it to build up so anything over 500 is considered somewhat problematic usually when you have hemochromatosis you have extremely high numbers but sometimes it won't show up right away so it really depends on several different things like your specific genetics so there's several different gene alterations that will cause this iron to absorb if you're doing any kind of blood donations that will mitigate the risk for both males and females and your diet is gonna play a big role too so there's a iron to only in certain things main source of iron that we get is called heme iron and that's coming from the hemoglobin our blood of animals so if you're eating animal products you're getting some iron if you're not then you know you're getting a little bit but depending on how well how well you absorb it you probably won't get high iron if you're not consuming animal products okay so just to summarize we talked about two main reasons that people can get high iron one is through dietary consumption of high iron containing foods but usually you have to have some genetics in favor of absorbing iron like this hemochromatosis gene alterations that can do that so you don't have to have um a diagnosis of hemochromatosis to have a tendency towards that and you know the genetics around that oh maybe we'll save for another video if people are interested in this but when you go see a hematologist of blood specialist because you have super high iron levels it's usually depending on how high it is. this is what causes iron levels to be high.functional medicine practitioner