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Record W4411010952 · doi:10.1016/j.tmrv.2025.150905

Intravenous Iron Therapy Versus Blood Transfusion for Iron Deficiency Anemia: A Systematic Review

2025· review· en· W4411010952 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Martin Bedan, Christian Lottrup

Bibliographic record

VenueTransfusion Medicine Reviews · 2025
Typereview
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicIron Metabolism and Disorders
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedicineIntravenous ironAnemiaBlood transfusionIron deficiencyIntensive care medicineIron-deficiency anemiaTransfusion therapyIron therapyInternal medicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

of September 2024 by using PubMed, Cochrane, and Embase databases to identify studies comparing intravenous iron with blood transfusion in patients with iron deficiency anemia (<12 g/dL for women and <13 g/dL for men). The outcome selected was change in hemoglobin levels. The quality of the trials was assessed using Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool and Newcastle-Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale. We included 5 studies (three randomized controlled trials, 1 observational study and 1 retrospective study) comprising a total of 154,539 patients. Patient populations were heterogenous, encompassing surgical patients, patients undergoing hip fracture and pregnant women. Due to heterogeneity among the included studies, hemoglobin levels were reported at varying follow-up intervals. At 3 weeks follow-up or later after initial treatment, 3 studies reported significantly higher hemoglobin levels (ranging from 0.7 g/dL to 1.4 g/dL higher) in the intravenous iron group compared to the blood transfusion group. The remaining 2 studies found similar hemoglobin levels. Less than 3 weeks after initial treatment, 2 studies reported significantly higher hemoglobin levels in the blood transfusion group compared to the intravenous iron group. Our findings indicate that blood transfusion is more effective in achieving a rapid increase in hemoglobin levels shortly after therapy initiation, although this effect diminishes relatively swiftly. In contrast, intravenous iron seems to exert a more gradual increase in, but also longer lasting effect on, hemoglobin levels. However, our findings are limited by the small number of trials as well as questionable methodological quality of the included studies, resulting in a high risk of bias. Further investigation is warranted.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Meta-epidemiology (broad)
Consensus categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Systematic review · Consensus signal: Systematic review
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.411
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0150.003
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.054
GPT teacher head0.360
Teacher spread0.307 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designSystematic review
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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