RESUMO
Objective To investigate the value of red blood cell distribution width (RDW) in the diagnosis of Iron Deficiency Anemia(IDA).Methods Most relevant studies,which were retrieved from the Medline,Embase,and the Cochrane Library were identified according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria and data were extracted.Statistical analyses were performed by employing Meta-DiSc 1.4 software.Meta-analysis of the reported accuracy of each study was performed and summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC) curve was drawn.Results Four studies met the inclusion criteria for the analysis.Heterogeneity test did not find significant heterogeneity among included studies.RDW＞14％ was taken as the diagnostic critical value,the sensitivity was 0.92[95％CI(0.88,0.94)],the specificity was 0.41[95％CI(0.35,0.47)] and the AUC of SROC was 0.87.Conclusion RDW is sensitive and has good value in the diagnosis of IDA.