This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Women's Health  • Women's Health, Other  • Endocrine Diseases  • Diabetes Mellitus  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: Dr Jiang and colleagues¹ reported that higher iron stores are an independent risk factor for type 2 diabetes in healthy women. I am concerned that the cases had higher serum ferritin levels at the onset, and differed from controls in other important respects. Compared with controls, cases were more likely at baseline to have a family history of diabetes, an increased body mass index, less physical activity, higher levels of C-reactive protein, and substantially higher levels of insulin and hemoglobin A_1c (mean, 6.4%).

Although the authors did separate analyses to eliminate confounding by some of these other variables, their assertion that the results did not change "when the analyses were restricted to women with hemoglobin A_1c levels of less than 6.5%" does not appear to be substantiated. Furthermore, a hemoglobin A_1clevel cutoff of 6.4% seems high, and thus the authors may have included some patients with . . . [Full Text of this Article]

W. Douglas Trotter, MD
trotter.sfmc@vesgmail.net
Snohomish Family Medical Center
Snohomish, Wash

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Iron Stores as a Risk Factor for Diabetes in Women
Daniel McNeel Lane
JAMA. 2004;291(20):2428.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Iron Stores as a Risk Factor for Diabetes in Women—Reply
Rui Jiang, JoAnn E. Manson, and Frank B. Hu
JAMA. 2004;291(20):2428-2429.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Body Iron Stores in Relation to Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in Apparently Healthy Women
Rui Jiang, JoAnn E. Manson, James B. Meigs, Jing Ma, Nader Rifai, and Frank B. Hu
JAMA. 2004;291(6):711-717.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT