Pica anemia professional#
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Pica anemia free#
Please feel free to share in the comments below. I would love to know if any of my readers have experience with pica. Consuming certain items could potentially harm your body. If you or a loved one are showing signs of pica, please speak with your healthcare providers as soon as possible. In that case, perhaps it wouldn’t have gone on as long as it did. It took a serious, conscious effort for me to stop, but looking back, I wish I had known about the disorder earlier and had received help in breaking the habit. I never imagined that my strange and embarrassing addiction was sickle cell-related, but this served as yet another reminder that sickle cell disease affects every aspect of my life. In naming this condition, we hope to inspire further investigation, and hopefully shed some light for patients who suffer from this newly described olfactory symptom.I was happy to have a medical explanation for my habit. For this, we propose the name, desiderosmia, derived from the Latin word "desiderare" for desire and the Greek word " osme" for smell. The types of substances for which they craved and their associated medical conditions (when reported) are summarized in the Table.ĬONCLUSIONS:These preliminary findings and testimonies give suggestive evidence that a condition, entirely separate from pica, exists in certain patients suffering from IDA or during pregnancy. Individuals were reporting powerful cravings of olfaction, frequently being overtaken by a desire to smell certain odors.
However, using Google search engine, we found several testimonies of individuals in online blog posts (mostly at and ), several of which were pregnancy blogs that reported these peculiar symptoms. RESULTS: We found no scientific publication, report, or presentation similar to our experience in PubMed and Google Scholar. METHODS: We searched the PubMed, Google, and Google Scholar to find publications, reports, presentations, or testimonies of individual in online blogs using a combination of search terms including "nasal, olfactory, smell, craving, iron deficiency, and anemia." Because we had never heard of or read about this phenomenon, we reviewed the English medical literature and World Wide Web to determine if such experience had been previously reported. This resembled pica, a craving to eat non-nutritive items, which is commonly associated with IDA. BACKGROUND:In recent years,we saw four patients with iron deficiency anemia (IDA) in our clinical practices who developed a compulsive craving for certain odors including rubber tires, gasoline, Pine-Sol ® (a popular household alcohol ethoxylate-based cleaning agent), and "musty odor of the basement." Such behavior resolved after treatment of IDA, and recurred in a patient whose IDA relapsed.