QT High Iron and High Iron Saturation

This is Dr. Terranella and in this video segment that I'm calling Quick Tips, I wanted to give you guys a little bit of information on elevated iron and iron saturation. I've been getting a lot of questions, like, "I have a Transferrin saturation that's above 75%, or that's at 55%. Should I be concerned about this? What should I do?
Okay, so here's the thing: Yes, these values are high and you should be concerned to some degree, but context is always key to understand your health and understand what's actually going on. I will be posting more videos on hemochromatosis and high iron levels fairly shortly.

But I wanted to give a quick pointer in this video about how to address this and how to move forward. So the first thing is, one test isn't giving you the full context of what's going on. It's a clue, but it's not the final answer that's going to tell you what's actually going on. You and your treating doctor have the context to best understand your body, but not from one test.

One test is just a single snapshot in time and it's not really telling you what's going on in the bigger picture. That's why multiple tests are going to give you more context. Symptoms give you context, how you feel day-to-day, give you context. Other lab values give you context.

What was going on prior to the test? Did you have an iron supplement? Do you take a multivitamin with iron in it? Or maybe you have family members with hemochromatosis? All this creates the context around which we can make a more clear diagnosis, and from the diagnosis, the treatment. But it's important to step back when you get your initial lab results and fit it into that context.

And remember that one test does not make the diagnosis.

For most people, they are going to want to start with a follow-up test. And depending on how high those levels are, you may want to do the test right away, or you may be able to wait several weeks or even months before you do that, make some changes, and then see what it looks like.

It's also important in this context to understand what the transferrin saturation test is actually telling you about what's going on in your body. So when you have elevations, it's telling you that the amount of iron that's bound to the transferrin molecule is really high. That only becomes high when the amount of iron coming into your gut is getting bound up really quickly, and that only happens when you have a lot of iron around, whether it's coming in through your digestive tract or to a lesser extent when there's high iron turnover from red blood cell and other disorders like that.

The point is that there's a mechanism behind these things, but also that our bodies aren't robots. Sometimes the answer is, well, you had a steak or a burger the night before the test and that spiked the iron saturation, or you've been eating a lot of red meat recently.

Other times you may have done several tests and the levels are going up and down and it's confusing. And that may require several lines of inquiry to get to an answer, but either way, to understand what the cause is of your elevated iron or transferring, requires you to take charge of your own health and really get curious about more so the why the problem is happening, and less about getting a label or a diagnosis or a quick treatment.

Sometimes those labels can lead you down the wrong path. Sometimes they're really on target too, so you just gotta stay curious in the process of understanding these test results to really get a firm understanding of what's going on, and that curiosity is what's going to lead you to the answer that you're seeking in terms of feeling better, fixing numbers, et cetera.

So you definitely gotta be patient when you get a test result and it looks alarming, but you also gotta be persistent and curious.