Now It's Iron

DR. JEROME SULLIVAN TOLD YOU SO. MORE THAN A decade ago, the South Carolina medical researcher came up with a theory explaining why young women rarely have heart attacks. It isn't that they are protected by the hormone estrogen, as conventional wisdom had it, said Sullivan, but that they lose iron every month during menstrual bleeding. And iron, he believed, promotes heart attacks. Now a study from Finland, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, has provided strong evidence that he was right.

Nearly 2,000 Finnish men between the ages of 42 and 60, with no obvious evidence of heart disease, were monitored from 1984 through 1989; 51 ended up with heart attacks. It turned out that the second strongest risk factor, after smoking, was the blood level of a protein called ferritin -- and ferritin is a good indicator of overall iron levels. For each 1% increase of blood ferritin, there was more than a 4% increase in heart-attack risk. A ferritin level of 200 or more, compared with the normal 100 to 150, doubled the risk. The mechanism is unclear, but iron may contribute directly to heart-tissue damage as well as trigger the formation of artery-clogging plaques. If further studies bear out this result, it could explain not only the lower heart-attack rate in young women but also why eating meat can be dangerous (it's full of iron) and why aspirin can be a preventive (it can cause mild internal bleeding).

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CAPTION: RELATIVE RISK OF HEART ATTACK