Ferritin of 50 ng/mL for women
| Where it fallscommonly reported adult reference ranges | Within the reference range |
|---|---|
| Ferritinfor women | 50ng/mL |
| Usual reference range | 11 – 307ng/mL |
| Iron deficient | under 15ng/mL |
| Low iron stores | 15 – 29ng/mL |
| Within the reference rangethis reading | 30 – 307ng/mL |
| Above the reference range | 308 – 999ng/mL |
| Markedly raised | 1,000 and aboveng/mL |
Notes
- One reading is not a diagnosis. Ferritin moves with iron stores and, independently of them, any inflammation present. A clinician reads it against your history and usually against a repeat, not on its own.
- Reference ranges differ between laboratories. The bands above follow commonly reported adult reference ranges. Your own report prints the range its analyser was calibrated against, and that printed range is the one to compare against — a difference of a few units between labs is normal and does not mean either is wrong.
- Ferritin is both an iron store and an inflammatory marker, and that is its central difficulty. Infection, inflammation, liver disease, obesity, alcohol and malignancy all raise it independently of iron. Someone with genuine iron deficiency and an active inflammatory illness can therefore return a ferritin inside the reference range. Where the picture is mixed, transferrin saturation and CRP on the same sample are what separate the two.
- The lower bound is contested and clinically important. Many laboratories still flag ferritin as normal from 11 or 12 ng/mL upward, while iron-deficiency guidelines increasingly treat anything under 30 ng/mL as deficient, and under 45 as suspicious in symptomatic patients. A "normal" flag at the bottom of the range is one of the more common reasons iron deficiency goes unaddressed for years.
What ferritin of 50 ng/mL means
A reading of 50 ng/mLfor women falls in Within the reference range by commonly reported adult reference ranges.
The usual reference range is 11 – 307 ng/mL.
Reading it next to the rest of the picture
A single figure is a snapshot. What a clinician does with it is set by what sits around it — the other results on the same report, what the person is being treated for, what they were doing in the hours before the sample, and what the previous result was. Two people can hand over the same number and leave with different advice, and neither has been given the wrong answer.
That is also why the bands on this page are drawn from a named guideline rather than from a rounded rule of thumb. A threshold is a decision point somebody argued for in print, not a law of nature, and knowing which document a line comes from is what lets you tell a meaningful result from a borderline one.
Nearby sizes
Read more
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- eGFR Normal Range: Above 90, and the Stages Below IteGFR is an estimate built from creatinine, age and sex — and the estimate is better than the raw creatinine it comes from, for a reason worth understanding.
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- Cholesterol Numbers: What Total, LDL, HDL and Triglycerides MeanA lipid panel reports four numbers and the one printed largest — total cholesterol — is the least useful of them.