Iron deficiency and acute seizures: results from children living in rural Kenya and a meta-analysis.

There are conflicting reports on whether iron deficiency changes susceptibility to seizures. We examined the hypothesis that iron deficiency is associated with an increased risk of acute seizures in children in a malaria endemic area.We recruited 133 children, aged 3-156 months, who presented to a district hospital on the Kenyan coast with acute seizures and frequency-matched these to children of similar ages but without seizures. We defined iron deficiency according to the presence of malarial infection and evidence of inflammation. In patients with malaria, we defined iron deficiency as plasma ferritin