Testing and Diagnosing Anemia
How do you diagnose anemia? Anemia is a condition that can often be overlooked as a cause for many of the symptoms that are commonly experienced, such as fatigue. Though there are many things that may lead to fatigue: hormone imbalance, stress, poor diet, or a lack of sleep, anemia may be something to rule out through blood work.
Dr. Hayden and Dr. Horsley will help to clear up some of the questions that you may have concerning anemia as they continue their series, “Understanding Anemia – Overcoming Fatigue, Bruising, and Other Symptoms”. You will learn about what anemia is, what the symptoms are, how it is diagnosed, what the best treatment options are, and what it is commonly misdiagnosed as. These videos will be released over the next couple days on our youtube account, facebook account, and as a blog post on The Hayden Institute website.
Transcript from Video on Testing and Diagnosing Anemia:
Dr. Hayden: Thanks for joining us again, we’re continuing our discussion on anemia. In our previous videos we talked about what anemia is and what are some of the common symptoms that someone might experience with anemia. We talked about how anemia is an inefficiency of the red blood cells to carry oxygen and that some common symptoms are bruising, fatigue, dizziness, and hair loss. Well now, let’s pretend somebody has these symptoms and they go to the doctor, what types of tests might be used to diagnose anemia in someone’s life?
Dr. Horsley: So with anemia being a condition with red blood cells, you’re going to want to do a test that is going to look at the type of red blood cells you have: the quality and a lot of different characteristics of those cells. So that is going to be a test called a complete blood count, or a CBC that you can get in blood work from your general practitioner or whatever medical doctor that you’re seeing.
Dr. Horsley: What this will do is break down and see what type of red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets your body is creating. It will also look at hemoglobin (the protein that carries oxygen) and different specific things that look at the quality of the red blood cells which can give an idea of not only if you have anemia, but potentially what type of anemia and therefore what can be done to treat and help your anemia specifically.
Dr. Hayden: She said an interesting thing there: a type of anemia. This would insinuate that there are more than one type of anemia. What are some examples of different types of anemia and how they might be different from each other.
Dr. Horsley: There are several different types of anemia. Macrocytic anemia is a form in which your red blood cells are too big. So whenever blood cells are created they’re larger cells, that get much smaller as they mature. Therefore, they’re not maturing effectively. There could also be microcytic anemia, in which they are too small, or there could be hemolytic anemia, which means that your red blood cells are being destroyed too quickly by several different types of conditions.
Dr. Hayden: Following up with that, we have iron deficiency anemia, sometimes that’s the most common one people think of if you’re anemic. Often it seems that anemia patients just have iron thrown at them. They might feel better because of it, but that’s not always the case. So sometimes, in some situations, iron is not the appropriate situation for treating the anemia that’s present in someone. You mentioned macrocytic, microcytic, hemolytic, and iron deficient. Another form is sickle-cell anemia, which is a genetic type of anemia, which is more common in African-American individuals.
Dr. Hayden: There are a lot of different types of anemia out there and the first thing we look at is a complete blood count, and that will often give us a good understanding as to what’s going on with anemia inside someone, but sometimes it doesn’t give us all the answers. For example, in iron deficiency anemia, we could also add a ferritin test, which tells us how much available iron is present. In certain situations, blood tests may appear normal, but yet we still have symptoms of anemia – maybe some bruising or fatigue. This may mean that we’re just borderline anemic. Often then when we run specialty tests like the ferritin, we can see that those iron storage levels are in the tank and that’s where someone could benefit from increasing iron.
Dr. Hayden: So needless to say, when we look at how to diagnose anemia, blood work is going to be the gold standard – that’s where we look first. We use the patient’s presentation and symptoms to give us an idea of where to start, then we run the blood work to confirm it.
Be sure to check out our other posts related to anemia:
- What is Anemia?
- Common Anemia Symptoms
- Testing and Diagnosing Anemia
- Nutritional Applications for Macrocytic Anemia and Iron Deficiency Anemia
- Nutritional Applications for Hemolytic Anemia and MTHFR Gene Defects
- Misdiagnosing Anemia