Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast. My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be

talking to you about anemia in children. And if you want to follow along with written notes on this topic,

you can follow along in the haematology section of the Zero to Finals website or the Zero to Finals

Pediatrics book. So let's get straight into it.

Anemia is defined as a low level of hemoglobin in the blood. This is the result of an underlying

disease and is not a disease in itself. The prefix an means without and the suffix emia refers to blood.

Hemoglobin is a protein found in red blood cells.

It's responsible for picking up oxygen in the lungs and transporting it to the cells of the body.

Iron is an essential ingredient in creating hemoglobin and forms part of the structure of the molecule.

When a patient has a low level of hemoglobin, they have a condition called anemia.

When you find an anemic patient, you should check the mean cell volume, or MCV.

This is the size of the red blood cells and it gives you an indication of the underlying cause of the ademia.

The normal ranges for hemoglobin are determined by the local hematology lab.

This will depend on the age of the child.

The normal hemoglobin levels will vary significantly for the first six months of life as the child

transitions from fetal to adult hemoglobin and adapts to taking oxygen from the air rather

than from the placenta. The normal values are different for males and females after puberty, mainly due to menstruation

causing regular blood loss in females.

Let's go through some of the rough normal values of children across their age ranges.

This should not be used as a reference and is simply to give an impression of how the levels change with age.

At birth, the expected hemoglobin is somewhere between 150 to 235 grams per litre.

When the neonate gets to 2 to 4 weeks of age, this will be 135 to 190.

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