The people who may be at risk for iron deficiency are preterm infants, young children, teenage girls, pregnant women, and people with certain health conditions, including chronic heart failure, Crohn’s disease, celiac disease, and ulcerative colitis.

Iron supplements are commonly recommended for women who are pregnant or of childbearing age to help inhibit anaemia.[15]

Iron is the most abundant transition metal in the brain, where it is required to sustain the brain’s high respiratory activity, for myelinogenesis, and for the production of several neurotransmitters including dopamine and norepinephrine.

Iron deficiency is well-established to impair brain development and cognition.[16]
Although iron deficiency has been extensively studied in systemic organs until very recently, little attention was paid to its effects on brain function. The studies of Oski at Johns Hopkin Medical School in 1974 demonstrated the impairment of learning in young school children with iron deficiency. Indeed, animals made Iron deficient have lowered brain iron and impaired behaviours, including learning. This can become irreversible especially in newborns, even after long-term iron supplementation.

It is shown that in this condition it is the brain striatal dopaminergic-opiate system that becomes defective, resulting in alterations in circadian behaviours, cognitive impairment and neurochemical changes closely associated with them. More recently extended studies established that cognitive impairment may be closely associated with neuroanatomical damage and zinc metabolism in the hippocampus due to iron deficiency, which may result from abnormal cholinergic function.

The hippocampus is the focus of many studies today since this brain structure has high zinc concentration and is highly involved in many forms of cognitive deficits as a consequence of cholinergic deficiency and has achieved prominence because of dementia in ageing and Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, it is now apparent that cognitive impairment may not be attributed to a single neurotransmitter, but rather, to alterations and interactions of several systems in different brain regions. In animal models of iron deficiency, it is apparent that dopaminergic interaction with the opiate system and cholinergic neurotransmission may be defective.[17]