Spatone or iron sulphate for DD please?

[ThatVikRinA22]

after a thread on here the other day many people were advocating spatone for DD over the iron tablets the gp has prescribed for her - she is on 400mg per day at the minute taking one 200mg tablet in the morning and another one at night.

she is however complaining of side effects, including nausea.

can anyone explain the different between what the gp has prescribed and this spatone stuff please?

GP iron is hard to absorb. So you take big quantities. So the side effects are body dealing with the excess. Spatone is easily absorbed iron, so you need less so no side effects. Floradix is same and also good. As is iron pills as citrate.

so how much would she need to take if she was on 400mg of tablet form iron at the moment?

Not sure. I think there is info on the Spatone website about equivalences.

The Spatone site suggests that to get the same amount of iron as she would from 400mg of Ferrous sulphate tablets, she'd need 3-6 sachets per day. (3 if she's currently only absorbing 5% of the available iron in the tablets, 6 if 10%.)

Difference between Spatone and prescription iron tablets for me was that Spatone didn't rebuild my stores but I was only taking their recommended max dose of 2 sachets (i.e. what they suggested on the pack) but I can see now that they were not saying that was an upper limit, so I could have taken more. Would have been expensive though! I've since worked out that the dose of Ferrous fumarate that worked for me is equal to 10 sachets of Spatone per day (!!!) so I was very fortunate that the fumarate tablets agree with me!

ah right....

i wonder if she should take the tablets and then move onto a spatone to maintain her iron stores then....

Or iron as citrate tablets. Lamberts do them. Not sure equivalences again but they might have a number you can call, they're experts on this stuff. They are more easily absorbed too.

I got my stores back up with the Lamberts pills, Spatone and floradix. Various amounts at various times but didn't touch drs pills

I had ferrous sulphate prescribed when I was about 16 or 17. I also had some sort of pseudo chocolate tablets with them as well - think it was calcium gluconate to counteract the constipating effect of the ferrous sulphate.

However, the 2 worked out of phase - half the day I was biting the toilet seat in frustration at being bunged up - the other half I almost couldn't get there fast enough. Happy days