ABSTRACT
The anemia of chronic disease is one of the most common hematologic syndromes encountered in clinical medicine. It is probably the most frequent type of anemia other than iron deficiency resulting from blood loss (1). When all the anemic patients admitted to the medical center of an urban hospital in Texas were evaluated during 4 months in 1985-1986 (excluding those who were actively bleeding, undergoing
hemolysis, or had a diagnosis of a clonal hematologic disorder), 52% met laboratory diagnostic criteria for the anemia of chronic disease (low serum iron concentration and normal or elevated serum ferritin concentration) (2). The anemia of chronic disease is traditionally associated with chronic infectious diseases like tuberculosis, empyema and lung abscess, osteomyelitis, subacute bacterial endocarditis, cellulitis, chronic fungal infections, and the human immunodeficiency virus (3,4); with chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosus (5-7); and with cancer (8-10). While the majority of diseases associated with the anemia of chronic disease fall into one of these categories, in one series 40% of patients with this form of anemia lacked a traditional ‘‘chronic disease’’ (2).
