Abstract
When conducting widespread medical examinations throughout our municipality, our team of clinicians discovered many subjects who exhibited symptoms of zinc deficiency despite having serum zinc levels above 65 µg/dL, the commonly accepted limit of zinc deficiency. In this paper, we propose that the range used to express zinc deficiency be adjusted upwards to a new limit of 80µg/dL. When our research team used this higher value in our diagnoses of community members involved in the study, we correctly diagnosed zinc deficiency 91% of the time, with only 9% of our diagnoses being false negatives. Using the new limit, 25% of patients may be falsely diagnosed with a zinc deficiency (false positive) if their complaints or physical signs are not appropriately considered.
