Iron therapy in patients with heart failure. A straight shot

摘要

We are glad about the interest in our paper and thank Lippi et al. [1 ] for the commentary.We certainly would like to respond to each point raised by their letter. Lippi et al. [1 ] have set his commentary up on the fact that patients allocated into IRON-HF [2] trial were not iron deficient because mean ferritin level was 132 ± 138 ug/L Indeed this level would be within the normal range for the healthy population. However, IRON-HF study did not study a healthy population as we have selected a group of patients with left ventricular systolic dysfunction and symptoms of heart failure. In these patients, as well as in other inflammatory diseases such as chronic renal failure [3], juvenile arthritis [4] or inflammatory bowel diseases [5], patients do have an increment in ferritin levels due to an inflammatory milieu.