Popular Conclusions:
Patients with "organic psychosis" with a negative family history for psychiatric disorder had significantly lower B12 levels than those with a positive family history. In major depression, folate levels correlated negatively with age at onset of psychiatric illness and length of hospitalization. These data suggest that (1) biochemically interrelated vitamins such as B12 and folate may exert both a separate and a concomitant influence on affect and cognition; (2) poorer vitamin status may contribute to certain geropsychiatric disorders that begin at a later age and lack a familial predisposition.
Vitamin B12 deficiency in the elderly is a common disorder associated with an increased morbidity if it goes undetected, as often happens. Its diagnosis can be enhanced if the clinician recognizes the associated clinical features of nonspecific symptoms, glossitis, and dermatologic and neuropsychiatric abnormalities. Available data indicate it is sufficient to prescribe replacement B12 injections three or four times a year.
Vitamins play an essential role in lipid metabolism reactions and their presence is therefore absolutely necessary for these reaction to occur. Coenzyme B12 and folate coenzyme provide to balance, by methionine synthesis, the pool of methyl radicals necessary for phospholipid biosynthesis.
Vitamin B12 functions in the body
Cyanocobalamin (B12) is water soluble essential nutrient, helps the body manufacture hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying molecule found in red blood cells (low levels of vitamin B12 can result in type of anemia that can cause, among other things, a loss of sex drive).Intestinal bacteria can synthesize a small amount of Vit B12 , but animals, including humans, cannot get enough from their own bacteria and so must obtain it through the diet.
Vitamin B12 is essential for proper brain and nerve development and for DNA synthesis, improves learning, supports of methylation metabolism. Strict vegetarians need to supplement their diets with vitamin B12 because it is found in appreciable amounts only in animal food sources. Elderly people tend to lose their ability to absorb vitamin B12 because of decreased levels of hydrochloric acid in their stomachs and the synthesis of a gastric-binding protein required for absorption.
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