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Table of Contents
Importance and Benefits of the Study:
Abstract:
Iron deficiency anaemia is the most common type of anaemia. Iron is used in the body to produce red blood cells which help store and carry oxygen in the blood in the form of the pigment haemoglobin. The population that is most at risk of developing this condition is women of childbearing age due to menstrual losses and pregnancy as extra iron is needed to nourish the baby. Pregnant women that have untreated or severe iron deficiency anaemia have more of a chance of complications before and after birth (NHS, 2014). Therefore, it is crucial to monitor the health of the woman and her baby throughout the trimesters. The desk research done on this topic revealed the most common effects of iron deficiency anaemia are tiredness and lethargy, shortness of breath and pale complexion. However, it is a common perception that iron deficiency anaemia is found in mainly developing countries due to malnutrition and developed countries are overlooked in research. This makes a research on iron deficiency anaemia even more important. The research will help educate pregnant women in the UK about the effects of iron deficiency anaemia and its supplementation during pregnancy. In this way, they can take action at the right time to prevent any serious consequence to their baby or themselves. The women will be selected through a random convenience sample of 150, out of which 100 will be iron deficient and 50 non-iron deficient as controls. It will be a longitudinal study which will contain questionnaires at the first to know about the symptoms of iron deficiency, and then blood tests to know the levels of haemoglobin. Iron-deficient women will be given supplements and then their blood tests will be done again to know their haemoglobin levels. The results will then be analysed and compared to healthy pregnant women to know whether these results are reliable or not. Then a meta-analysis will be done to compare the results with developing countries.
Problem Statement:
There is a major problem with developing countries and iron deficiency anaemia; therefore, I will be researching the UK so that I can compare it to other countries and conduct a meta-analysis to critically evaluate and combine the results statistically to gain an overview on the whole topic relating iron deficiency anaemia, pregnancy and various populations. Pregnancy is a very sensitive time for the mother and the baby as a slight deficiency can have dire consequences, therefore it got me asking how this affects people in different countries, so I came up with the proposal question of how does iron deficiency anaemia affect pregnant women in the UK including a meta-analysis comparison with research from developing countries.
Literature Review:
Habimana et al. (2013) conducted a study which suggested that pregnant women are more likely to have iron deficiency than non-pregnant and postpartum women. This sets the premise for taking pregnant women as the population of interest as pregnant women are more likely to have iron deficiency anaemia.
There have been many studies that bring about the notion that developing countries are more likely to have people with iron deficiency anaemia as shown by a critical review by Ahmed et al. (2014) who found that maternal deaths, stillbirths and underweight births are common consequences in Pakistan. However, the study is unclear about how these consequences could not have been a result of other factors.
The study also claims that iron deficiency is a huge problem for developing countries, but there is a need to know how iron deficiency is a problem for developed countries like the UK. This research was seconded by Nazir et al. (2011), who concluded that anaemia may be on the rise in developing countries as 60% of 16000 women tested were found to be anaemic. The way that this can be addressed is by taking supplements before and between pregnancies. Again, the research fails to address how this is an issue of developing countries only and not the developed countries. One more question that arises in from this research is if women in developed countries do not take supplements, will they not have iron deficiency anaemia?
Cogswell et al. (October 2003) concluded that prenatal iron supplementation needs to be looked into further as a way to reduce health costs and birth weight. So Dibley et al. (2012) looked further into supplementation in pregnant women and found that, if developing countries increased the use of iron-folic acids during pregnancy, it will reduce the deaths in children.
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