Dementia risk could increase with low levels of essential vitamin

“Normal” levels of vitamin B12 may not be enough to ward off dementia, new research finds.Researchers at the University of California San Francisco studied 231 healthy older adults (averaging 71 years of age) who did not have dementia or mild cognitive impairment.Blood tests showed that their B12 levels averaged 414.8 pmol/L, while the recommended minimum level in the U.S.is just 148 pmol/L.Participants who had lower B12 levels were found to have “slower cognitive and visual processing speeds” when taking tests, which is linked to “subtle cognitive decline,” according to a UCSF press release.The effect was more pronounced with age.The people with lower levels also had more lesions in the white matter in their brains, which can be a warning sign of cognitive decline, dementia or stroke, the researchers found.The findings were published in Annals of Neurology on Feb.

10.Based on these results, the researchers recommend updating the current B12 requirements.“Previous studies that defined healthy amounts of B12 may have missed subtle functional manifestations of high or low levels that can affect people without causing overt symptoms,” said senior author Ari J.Green, MD, of the UCSF Departments of Neurology and Ophthalmology and the Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “Revisiting the definition of B12 deficiency to incorporate functional biomarkers could lead to earlier intervention and prevention of cognitive decline.”The researchers did acknowledge that the study only included older adults, who may have a “specific vulnerability” to lower levels of B12.Those lower levels, however, “could impact cognition to a greater extent than what we previously thought, and may affect a much larger proportion of the population than we realize,” according to co-first author Alexandra Beaudry-Richard, who is currently completing her doctorate in research and medicine at the UCSF Department of Neurology and the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at...