Nutritional Anemias

edited by Usha Ramakrishnan, 2000, 280 pages, hardcover, $89.95. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.

Mount Sinai–NYU Health System & Bronx VA Medical Center
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Correspondence: E-mail: nutristar{at}aol.com

This book is intended for an audience of public health professionals, who will find it of great value. A better title would be National and International Public Health Aspects of Nutritional Anemias. Editor Usha Ramakrishnan, who holds a degree in international nutrition from Cornell University, is an assistant professor in the Department of International Health at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Ramakrishnan's research interests include maternal and child nutrition and micronutrient malnutrition, including iron undernutrition and, to a much lesser extent, folate and vitamin B-12 undernutrition. The book is not of particular value to physicians and dietitians, who are better served by reading about nutritional anemias in the latest edition of the standard textbook in their respective fields (ie, textbooks of hematology, clinical nutrition, medicine, or clinical dietetics).

Of the 12 chapters in Nutritional Anemias, only 3 are of any significant value to practicing physicians and dietitians: "Prevalence and Causes of Nutritional Anemias" by Lindsay Allen and Jennifer Casterline-Sabel, "Assessment of Nutritional Anemias" by Sean Lynch and Ralph Green, and "Functional Consequences of Nutritional Anemia in Adults" by John Beard. These 3 chapters recapitulate the excellent work and reviews published by these authors in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and other journals and textbooks and presented at the annual meetings of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the American Society for Nutritional Sciences, and other health professional organizations. Much of the public health work on iron reported in this book was presented at the International Nutritional Anemia Consultative Group (INACG) Symposium in Hanoi, Vietnam, on February 15 and 16, 2001. INACG is an arm of the International Life Sciences Institute of Washington, DC, which, it is hoped, may publish the proceedings of the Hanoi Symposium, as it did some of the abstracts submitted to the symposium.