Iron, Emotion, and Awareness: Exploring Alexithymia and Anxiety in Anemic Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite being highly prevalent among women of reproductive age, the psychological dimensions of iron deficiency anemia (IDA) often go unrecognized. While the hematological consequences of IDA are well established, emerging evidence suggests that it may also adversely affect emotional processing, mental health, and overall quality of life. This study aimed to systematically assess levels of alexithymia, anxiety, depressive symptoms, and quality of life in women diagnosed with IDA compared to age-matched healthy controls. A total of 151 women with confirmed IDA and 150 healthy controls were recruited. Participants underwent laboratory testing and completed validated questionnaires, including the Beck Depression Scale (BDS), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), WHOQOL-BREF-TR, and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). Women with IDA demonstrated significantly higher alexithymia and anxiety scores and lower quality of life compared to controls. Within the IDA group, probable alexithymia was associated with more severe anemia parameters and poorer psychological outcomes. These findings indicate that IDA is not only a hematological disorder but also one with a substantial psychological burden. Recognizing and addressing these psychological dimensions in clinical practice is critical. A multidisciplinary management approach that integrates both hematological treatment and mental health interventions may be essential to improve overall patient outcomes among women with IDA.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".