The percent saturation of transferrin and the usual erythrocyte parameters did not reflect changes in iron status. Loss of iron, which was calculated from quantitative phlebotomy and iron balance data, showed that a decrease of 1 ng of serum ferritin represented a loss of 4.5 +/- 5.3 mg of ...
Ferritin binds thousands iron ions more than transferrin3. Thus, we wanted to exclude the possibility that the relaxivity differences were being driven by the different iron ion concentration. We estimated the iron ion concentrations for the different molecular iron environments, and verified that ferri...