The Iron Content of the Whole Blood of Normal Individuals

During t.he course of an investigation involving the determination of blood iron values in normal subjects, it became evident that t.he results were consistently higher than the figures recently reported for human blood by Murphy, Lynch, and Howard (1) and Reich and Tiedemann (2). Furt,hermore, hemoglobin values calculat,ed on the basis of their iron determinations differed considerably from values obtained by them, with t,he Sahli and Newcomer methods. Oxygen capacit,y figures calculated from their iron determinat,ions were also lower t,han those generally considered normal in the literature. Since the oxygen capacity method is the standard method of determining the hemoglobin content of blood, simultaneous determinations of oxygen capacity by the Van Slyke and Neil1 method (3) and iron determinations by the Kennedy method (4) were made on the blood of a series of normal men and women. Since the completion of this work, Sachs, Levine, and Appelsis (5), using the Wong met.hod (6), have reported iron values for the blood of normal men that are in accord with the data recorded in this paper, although their figures for normal women are definitely lower. In order to determine whether the discrepancies in the iron values quoted in the papers above might be explained by the methods used for estimating t,he iron content, a comparison was also made between t.he Kennedy and t,he Wong methods.