The influence of maternal iron-deficiency anaemia on the haemoglobin of the infant.

The object of this study is to define the part played by maternal iron-deficiency anaemia in the pathogenesis of iron deficiency anaemia in infancy, a condition commonly found in Cape Town (Lanzkowsky and McKenzie, 1959; Lanzkowsky, 1959 and 1960a). A number of early reports on the effect of maternal iron-deficiency anaemia on the newborn have indicated that maternal anaemia does not cause anaemia in the infant soon after birth and that the foetus avails itself of maternal blood-forming materials necessary for its own requirement irrespective of the condition of maternal blood (Baar and Stransky, 1928; Strauss, 1933; Strauss and Castle, 1933; Fullerton, 1937; Davidson and Fullerton, 1938). This view has been opposed by Maurer, Greengard and Kluver (1932). Paradoxically, Strean and Gottlieb (1936) found that the greater the maternal anaemia, the greater the foetal polycythaemia. More recently Sisson and Lund (1958), basing the diagnosis of iron-deficiency anaemia on calculation of maternal and infant red cell volume and haemoglobin mass, concluded that infants of anaemic mothers frequently did have an iron-deficiency anaemia. Woodruff and Bridgeforth (1953) and Sturgeon (1959), on the other hand, are at variance with the work of Sisson and Lund and have convincingly shown in large and well-controlled series that there is no difference in the state of iron nutrition in groups of infants born to mothers with various degrees of iron nutrition. Many authors have endorsed the statement that infants born to anaemic mothers become anaemic towards the end of the first year, although scientific evidence supporting this concept is very scanty. Mackay (1931), Abt and Nagel (1932), Neale and Hawksley (1933), Parsons (1933), Strauss (1933, 1935) and Hahn, Carothers, Darby, Martin, Sheppard, Cannon, Beam, Densen, Peterson and McClellan (1951) all favoured the view that maternal