Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 83Iron Metabolism and DisordersSmoking Behavior and CessationErythropoietin and Anemia Treatment

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 91 of the 92 references it cites were found in a registry or an index, and 1 are not checked yet; none of the 89 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Anaemia and cigarette smoking

Open access
LEIFERT, J. A.·2008·International Journal of Laboratory Hematology

Abstract

Summary: Cigarette smoking causes numerous diseases that are associated with anaemia but the resulting low haemoglobin levels may be counterbalanced by increased red blood cell production caused by chronic exposure to carbon monoxide from cigarette smoke. Diverse mechanisms are involved in influencing the development or the course of anaemic disease in smokers. This article presents an evaluation of the current literature on the impact of cigarette smoking on various forms of anaemia.

Checked 2026-11-13 · 1 reference not checked yet

Overview

CoChat Summary

TL;DR

This narrative review evaluates literature on how cigarette smoking affects anaemia, noting that smoking often raises haemoglobin and can mask anaemia while also influencing iron, folate, haemolytic, and aplastic anaemia pathways. It concludes that effects vary by anaemia type and that further studies are needed.

Key findings

  • Smoking-associated Hb elevation may mask anaemia: among women of comparable socio-economic status, anaemia prevalence was 4.8% in smokers vs 8.5% in never-smokers (Nordenberg et al., 1990). Hb increases are generally reversible; healthy ex-smokers show no Hb difference vs nonsmokers, though long-term smokers with COLD or emphysema may have persistently elevated Hb/polycythaemia.
  • Folate levels in serum or RBCs are reduced in smokers, in both nonpregnant and pregnant individuals, and the risk of reduced RBC folate relates to cigarettes smoked per day; vitamin B12 findings remain inconsistent. Smoking is well documented as correlated with myeloid leukaemia, with relative risk correlated with quantity smoked; benzene is linked to aplastic anaemia, but AA-smoking data are rare (Linet et al., 1989 found no significant correlation in 59 patients), and average smoker benzene uptake of approximately 1.8 mg/day may be too low to show AA effects.
  • In sickle cell disease, smoking-related reduced oxygenation may precipitate crisis, acute chest syndrome is more frequent in smokers, and children exposed to environmental tobacco smoke had more inpatient sickle cell crises (West et al., 2003). HbCO is elevated in smokers but no correlation with vaso-occlusive severity was detected (Sears et al., 2001); CO may stabilize Hb Zurich and reduce haemolysis.
  • In pregnancy, most studies show no significant Hb difference between smoking and nonsmoking women, but fetuses of mothers who continued smoking had elevated HbF and higher haematocrit levels.

Methods

  • Narrative review/evaluation of the current literature on the impact of cigarette smoking on various forms of anaemia; no primary data are collected.
  • The text does not describe a systematic search strategy, inclusion criteria, or quantitative meta-analysis; it synthesizes cited studies across iron homeostasis, haemolytic anaemia, megaloblastic anaemias, and aplastic anaemia/haematotoxicity.

Limitations

  • Stated: human data on cigarette smoke-induced haemolysis are inconclusive; specific data on thalassaemia and cigarette smoking are not available; AA-smoking data are rare; it is unclear whether reduced folate correlates with higher megaloblastic anaemia incidence; vitamin B12 data are inconsistent; further studies are needed.
  • Evident: as a narrative review, it relies on previously published studies and does not report a systematic search or formal quality assessment; conclusions may be constrained by heterogeneity and small study sizes noted in the text.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/j.1751-553x.2008.01067.x

Cites

91 of 92 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

0 Valid · 1 Not valid · 58 Not checked · 33 Own results and interpretations

54 more claims

Create a free account to see all 92 claims and to verify the 71 references still open.

See all claims — free account
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 21
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 19

Create a free account to see these claims.

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

2 of 2

Citations

Cites

Show all 91 references

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. 10.1016/s0029-7844(99)00622-5 · DOI

Cited by

Metadata

Authors
LEIFERT, J. A.
Affiliations
University of Freiburg (DE)
Corresponding author
LEIFERT, J. A.
Venue
International Journal of Laboratory Hematology
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2008-06
Volume
30
Issue
3
Pages
177-184
ISSN
  • 1751-5521 (ISSN-L)
  • 1751-553X
OpenAlex
W2147291454
Cited by
83
References
91
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 4
FWCI
0.18
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • International Journal of Laboratory Hematology (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Hematology › Iron Metabolism and Disorders
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Smoking Behavior and Cessation
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Hematology › Erythropoietin and Anemia Treatment
Keywords
anemia, cigarette smoking, carbon monoxide, hemoglobin, erythropoiesis, smoking and disease
MeSH terms
Anemia, Carbon Monoxide, Carboxyhemoglobin, Humans, Smoking

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-11-13, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).

A second model labelled each claim on 2026-11-13 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.