New Delhi: Have you been feeling tired and listless for no particular reason? It could be stress, depression or, most likely if you’re a woman, the ubiquitous but very fixable anaemia.
Stress is fairly easy to measure, you need to accept that your brain is on a multitasking overdrive and look for physiological and psychological ways to wind down. Depression, too, is usually accompanied with other signs such as sleeplessness, anxiety and mood swings, and can usually be discounted if tiredness is the only symptom.
This leaves out anaemia, which usually gets missed unless it pops up in a blood test report. In people otherwise healthy, even mild anaemia can cause tiredness, headache, dizziness, fatigue and lack of concentration, with pale skin, nails and gums being the only visible and overlook-able symptoms.
Anaemia affects more women than men, with pregnant women, lactating mothers and adolescent girls being at most risk. In India, three in five women have haemoglobin – the oxygen-carrying iron-containing protein in red blood cells – counts below the recommended healthy level of 13 gm/dl. So common is anaemia among women that many physicians regard 12 gm/dl as the “Indian healthy normal.”
One in seven meet the textbook definition of “severely anaemic”, with haemoglobin levels below 7gm/dl. Yet, very few women do anything about it. For haemoglobin below 7gm/dl, physicians in developed countries prescribe iron, vitamin B12 and folate supplementation. Some even consider blood transfusion. But not in India. Here we prefer the natural route of a few spoonfuls of honey or an apple a day, which does nothing to push up your haemoglobin counts.
