Your post also mentioned that males tend to have iron overload. I find this to be suspect, as if males tended to have iron overload, the study would have probably found that blood donation decreases mortality.
That said, for those who do have iron overload, blood donation likely does fix that.
I don’t know how prevalent iron overload is. It might well be rare enough so that its effects are lost in the noise. I wasn’t claiming that donating blood is necessarily healthy, my point was rather that mechanisms (not correlations) by which blood donation could be useful for health exist.
If you don’t know how prevalent iron overload is, then you can’t know that men tend to have it, so I suggest editing you comment to say “some men have iron overload” instead of “men tend to have iron overload.”
Iron overload / haemochromatosis occurs in approx 0.5% of the population of Northern European origin (and less in other ethnicities). Undiagnosed and untreated the iron will build up in the liver and other organs and cause a variety of unpleasant side effects. Venesection is the standard treatment, though I suggest that less than 0.5% of the population is not significant enough to explain the other studies.
Your post also mentioned that males tend to have iron overload. I find this to be suspect, as if males tended to have iron overload, the study would have probably found that blood donation decreases mortality.
That said, for those who do have iron overload, blood donation likely does fix that.
I don’t know how prevalent iron overload is. It might well be rare enough so that its effects are lost in the noise. I wasn’t claiming that donating blood is necessarily healthy, my point was rather that mechanisms (not correlations) by which blood donation could be useful for health exist.
If you don’t know how prevalent iron overload is, then you can’t know that men tend to have it, so I suggest editing you comment to say “some men have iron overload” instead of “men tend to have iron overload.”
Iron overload / haemochromatosis occurs in approx 0.5% of the population of Northern European origin (and less in other ethnicities). Undiagnosed and untreated the iron will build up in the liver and other organs and cause a variety of unpleasant side effects. Venesection is the standard treatment, though I suggest that less than 0.5% of the population is not significant enough to explain the other studies.
Source: http://www.haemochromatosis.org.uk/index.html