Biological tissue magnetism in the frame of iron overload diseases

The conspicuous magnetic properties of iron, paradoxically, rarely participate in the methods routinely employed in the clinical environment to detect iron containing species in tissues. In the organism iron is just a trace metal and it mostly occurs as part of haemoproteins or ferritin, which show paramagnetic, diamagnetic or antiferromagnetic behaviour, hence resulting in a very low contribution to the tissue susceptibility. Detailed magnetic measurements make it nowadays possible to identify such species in tissues that correspond to individuals with iron overload pathologies. Since, as alternatives to the conventional biopsy, magnetism-based noninvasive techniques to diagnose and manage such diseases are recently under development, the deep knowledge of the magnetic properties of the different forms of iron in tissues is of high applied interest.