Vitamin B and folic acid do not reduce a person’s potential for suffering memory loss from age, dementia, or Alzheimer’s disease. This is the conclusion drawn from the most recent tests of vitamin B and folic acid by Dr. Rosalie Dhonukshe-Rutten of Wageningen University in Wageningen, the Netherlands.
Homocysteine is a blood protein that has been previously correlated with the onset and progress of memory loss in people that have dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Vitamin B and folic acid have been proven to lower the levels of homocysteine in people’s bloodstream. The hope was that vitamin B and folic acid or a combination of the two compounds would be an easy fix for memory loss from age, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease.
The new study looked at the effect of vitamin B and folic acid on the memory of 2,919 people with an average age of 74 that had high homocysteine levels in their blood. The people received a placebo, 400 micrograms of folic acid, or 500 micrograms of vitamin B daily for two years. The participants were tested for memory and thinking skills at the beginning of the study and at the end of the study.
No improvement in memory function of thinking ability was seen in the people that consumed folic acid or vitamin B. The researchers term the results to be “unfortunate”. While the easy fix may not work there are hundreds of people working on the problem of memory loss and when they do find the answer it may be very simple even though at present the problem is tied up in complexity.
