FIGURE 3.

Food iron absorption in chronic HD patients in comparison with control. The black line and blue square plots show the relationship between serum ferritin and food iron absorption in 47 normal volunteers [97]. Increasing log-transformed percent iron absorption is associated with a linear decrease in log-transformed serum ferritin. The red line and red circle plots show the same relationship in 13 HD patients, whose ferritin levels are within the range from 10 to 200 µg/L from the previous reports, on the same graph [100]. Interestingly, the line linking iron absorption to serum ferritin in HD patients overlaps that of the healthy controls for ferritin levels. At that time, water purification for HD was far from endotoxin free. Thus even in a condition of poor dialysate purity, i.e. a highly probable cause of inflammation, iron absorption in HD patients was mainly dependent on ferritin.