Kamran B Lankarani1,
Payam Peymani1 
,
Sahar Zare2,
Reza Tabrizi1,
MH Kazemi3,
GR Omrani3
For correspondence:- Payam Peymani Email: Peymani.payam@gmail.com
Received: 23 June 2015 Accepted: 25 August 2015 Published: 31 October 2015
Citation: Lankarani KB, Peymani P, Zare S, Tabrizi R, Kazemi M, Omrani G. Prevalence of vitamin b12 and folate deficiencies and homocysteinemia in elderly population of Shiraz, southern Iran. Trop J Pharm Res 2015; 14(10):1907-1912 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v14i10.24
© 2015 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..
Purpose: To investigate the prevalence of cobalamin and folate deficiencies among the elderly in the general population of Shiraz in southern Iran.
Methods: This is a descriptive cross-sectional study including 340 individuals who are over 50 years old and were selected randomly from all the regions of Shiraz.
Results: The study group was made up of 132 (38.8 %) males and 208 (61.2 %) females. In this group 174 (51.2 %) were aged 50 - 59 years and 166 (48.8 %) were aged ≥ 60 years. Cobalamin deficiency (< 200 pg/mL) was present in 124 (36.2 %) while 42 (12.4 %) had severe deficiency with levels < 100 pg/mL. Signs of metabolic deficiency at the cellular level were seen in 21 (5.25 %) of the samples. Serum folate deficiency (< 4 ng/mL) was present in 134 (39.4 %) while 19 (5.6 %) persons had severe folate deficiency (≤ 2 - 3 ng/mL). Correlation analysis showed that serum cobalamin and homocysteine in the study samples were not significant (p > 0.05).
Conclusion: The prevalence of severe cobalamin deficiency with clinical significance is high in the elderly population of Shiraz, Iran.
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