If your wellbeing is at risk to developing Alzheimer’s disease, you may be able to slow its onset through daily B vitamins. This is according to researchers at the University of Oxford, who found that the brain areas associated with Alzheimer’s were protected in people who took high doses of vitamin B12, B6 and folic acid.
Led by David Smith and Gwenaëlle Douaud, the researchers used MRI to track changes in the brains of 200 elderly volunteers with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) over two years. While it’s known that B vitamin supplements help reduce homocysteine levels in the blood, which reduces Alzheimer’s risk, until now it hasn’t been clear whether or not these would slow the progression of MCI often to Alzheimer’s.
For the study, half of the participants were given a placebo, while the others took high doses of vitamin B12, B6 and folic acid – 300, 20 and 4 times the UK guideline daily amounts, respectively. In the brains of volunteers given the vitamins, the areas most seriously affected by Alzheimer’s, including the hippocampus and cerebellum, were protected. In participants who had high homocysteine, for example, the placebo group had an atrophy rate of 5.2% in these brain regions, while the rate was just 0.6% in the vitamin group.
Smith asserted that the study ‘demonstrates for the very first time that it is possible to modify the disease process in Alzheimer’s.’ However, according to Simon Ridley at Alzheimer’s Research UK, more work is needed to explore the link. He commented, ‘It’s important to note the effects in this trial were only seen in a subgroup of people with MCI. We must also remember that only a proportion of people with MCI will go on to develop Alzheimer’s, and it’s not yet clear why this is the case.’
Yet Smith argues that vitamin supplements are safe for most people, and so they could perhaps be offered to high-risk people as a precaution. ‘I think we need to bite the bullet and say, is there any reason that elderly people with memory problems shouldn’t be offered them in the meantime?’ he says. ‘I raised the same question at a conference last year and a psychiatrist in the audience put his hand up and said “We already do since your first paper [showing that high doses of B vitamins slowed whole-brain shrinkage by up to 53% in patients with above average homocysteine levels] came out”. So there’s nothing to stop clinicians doing this.’
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