Its worth checking how much blood you are providing for the blood tests. My own haemoglobin is good, but my ferritin and iron saturation are both low. I have concluded this arises from me needing iron for the blood tests. (one of them takes 25ml of blood which is 12.5mg of iron).
Iron supplementation perhaps provides 20% bioavailability.
What I had noted over a 30 month period of weekly blood tests is ferritin going down from an initial 400 to bouncing around the bottom much like yours. I recently did a short fast, but started additional iron supplementation after the fast to reinstate the iron lost in the blood draws. (I already had a little supplementation in the Solgar VM2000 which I took twice a week).
I have started on 20mg of elemental iron per day in the ferrous glycinate form. That should provide about 28mg of iron in my systems per week and should easily offset the blood draw. I am not doing another blood test now until the week after this.
I have not had any symptoms of anaemia, but I have had similar movements in terms of transferrin saturation and ferritin.
WBC suppression should be expected from rapamycyin. It may also happen from a shortage of iron. My own WBC have been low recently not as a result of rapamycin because I have not taken it recently. I thought it was infection, but interestingly it could be a symptom of low iron even if I am not anaemic.
Somewhat entertainingly there appears to be a difference between the two labs I use one of which takes 10ml of blood the other of which 25ml (and possibly a touch more). When I use the one lab my ferritin/transferring saturation remains about the same, but with the lab which takes more blood the levels go down. This also seems to have a pattern with WBC, but all of these things are quite volatile.
My next few tests will give a response to supplementation. I wonder if MCV is affected by this as well through a reduction in the creation of new RBCs. Hence the average cell life gets longer. MCV was a biomarker I was particularly unhappy about as it was around 100 femtolitres in summer 2024, but by taking melatonin (200mg) prior to getting drunk (I think this is the reason) it has come down.
