 I am Dr. Devavinsa, consultant in clinical hematology and bone marrow transplantation at Manipar Hospital, Dwarka. Today I would like to talk about one of the most common hematological disorders that are seen in our day-to-day practice, that is anemia. Anemia or low hemoglobin basically can be caused by two causes, one if there is decreased production of red blood cells that can be because of nutritional deficiency, bone marrow failures or it could be because of some chronic diseases or infections or if there is an increased destruction of red blood cells as in seen in thalassemia, sickle cell anemia, some enzyme deficiencies like G6PD deficiency or if there is production of antibodies in our body which self-destroy our red blood cells as in autoimmune rheumatic anemia. Nutritional deficiency or leading to anemia is the most common cause of anemia that is seen and it will be very surprising to know that 50% of Indian women suffer from some grade of nutritional anemia, most commonly iron deficiency anemia. What is the reason that anemia is so common in our country? The reason is that we have a very poor dietary intake, second is lot of food fats that exist in our diets. We are majority a population of vegetarians and the vegetarian diet, the iron content is there but the type of iron in our vegetarian diet is not readily absorbed. Vitamin D12 which is another important nutrient required for production of red blood cells is very very low in vegetarian diet leading to high incidence of iron deficiency and other nutritional anemias in Indian population. How do we diagnose, how does the patient present to us with anemia? Generally the patients have symptoms of extreme tiredness, they feel lethargic whole day, they say that they don't feel like doing anything, increased irritability, some patients they complete of seeing blackish shadows in front of their eyes, so whenever you have these symptoms we should suspect of anemia because the unfortunate part is that most of the anemias in our country go undiagnosed. Whenever you have these symptoms you should contact your dermatologist, first investigation that we do in case of anemias is to do a complete blood count with a peripheral smear because it gives us lot of information about the type of anemia, what can be the possible cause of it. Once we know the type of anemia we go ahead with further investigation depending on what we are suspecting could be the underlying cause like you know iron profile, we can do vitamin B12 or red cell folate level and some specialized investigations may be also be required depending what we are suspecting. Some patients may even require some invasive procedures like endoscopy or even bone marrow examination. Coming to the management of iron deficiency anemia where we have come a long way, gone other days when we used to give our patient those long term oral supplements which used to have very bad gastrointestinal effects or painful iron injections, today we have very safe and effective IV preparations which are very safe to take, very tolerable and also very very effective. So I would really suggest everybody who has any symptoms that can suggest of anemia to contact your hematologist immediately and get treated as soon as possible. Thank you.