Monitoring of iron status and clinical evaluation of interventions intended to maintain clinically adequate iron status in women who are new blood donors

The study will provide information needed for the New Zealand Blood Service to develop a strategy that will deal effectively with issue of impaired iron status and iron deficiency in some female blood donors. This is an important problem because of the potential for adverse effects on donor health and secondly because of loss of donors from the active donor panel. No commonly agreed strategies exist in international practice for Blood Services to deal with these problems which involve a complex set of interrelated issues. These include: dietary patterns and overall iron status in females in the community, the amount of iron in each whole blood donation, the frequency of donor call-up to donate, the use of tests to assess donor iron status and the scope for low risk iron intervention strategies that are acceptable to the blood donor community and are demonstrably effective. The study will evaluate the effect of two interventions: firstly, iron replacement using a product that is available as a registered nutritional supplement. This product will provide partial replacement of the iron in each blood donation. The second approach will assess the impact of written and verbal dietary advice. The study will evaluate the effect on iron status from the interventions in a cohort of female new donors together with the effect of the interventions on return rates to give further donations by the donors. NZ Blood Service expects to develop strategies for donor iron status testing and for donor iron support from information obtained in this study and in other recent research on iron status in NZ blood donors.