Psychosomatic Medicine 15:477-484 (1953)
© 1953 American Psychosomatic Society

Nutritional Anemia in Children

Importance of Emotional, Social, and Economic Factors

¹ University of Illinois, College of Medicine, Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, Chicago, Illinois

Although infants are provided with an adequate supply of iron for the first six months of life, the expanding blood volume and erythropoiesis associated with rapid growth render an exogenous source of iron essential for the prevention of nutritional anemia during the second six months of infancy and early childhood. Our study was concerned with determining the factors responsible for inadequate iron ingestion in infants and young children with nutritional anemia.

In general, our study indicated that social, economic, and emotional factors served to disturb the feeding pattern, with resultant development of feeding problems. Thus, a disturbance in the parent-child relationship reflected as feeding problems were responsible for the development of anemia in this group of patients. Some of the specific problems observed were inability to breastfeed; regressive anorexia associated with toilet training or with weaning; perpetuation of anorexia, which may occur with teething or acute infections; and perpetuation of physiological anorexia, which may occur in the second year of life. Immaturity of parents, marital incompatabilities, sexual problems, as well as the social and economic factors associated with poor housing and financial privation, all were factors causing a poor parent-child relationship. The most consistent single finding perhaps was the failure of any single mother in this series to breastfeed her infant.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				J. H. Githens and W. E. Hathaway Iron Deficiency Anemia of Infancy: Pathogenesis, Diagnosis and Management Clinical Pediatrics, September 1, 1963; 2(9): 477 - 483. [PDF]