B Vitamins alleviate anxiety, mental anguish, painful tongue | Andrea de Michaelis – Creating my own reality, one thought at a time

Mental anguish can be from vitamin deficiencies which are easy to fix. A niacin deficiency can cause anxiety, mental anguish, along with a painful tongue. Entire mental wards were emptied when niacin was first discovered and given to patients. B vitamins are found to slow progression of dementia. David Smith of Oxford University’s Department of Pharmacology conducted a two-year trial with 168 volunteers with MCI (mild cognitive impairment,) a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Volunteers were given either a vitamin pill containing very high doses of folic acid, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12, or a placebo dummy pill. These B vitamins are known to control levels of an amino acid called homocysteine in the blood, and high blood levels of homocysteine are linked to an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. The dose contained around 300 times the recommended daily intake of B12, four times daily advised folate levels and 15 times the recommended amount of B6. Note: Never take large dosages of vitamins without medical supervision.

Brain scans were taken at the beginning and the end of the trial to monitor the rate of brain shrinkage, or atrophy. The results, published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) One journal, showed that on average the brains of those taking the vitamin treatment shrank at a rate of 0.76 percent a year, while those taking the dummy pill had an average brain shrinkage of 1.08 percent. People who had the highest levels of homocysteine at the start of the trial benefited the most from the treatment, with their brains shrinking at half the rate of those on the placebo. Although the trial was not designed to measure cognitive ability, the researchers found those people who had lowest rates of shrinkage had the highest scores in mental tests. Original article here.