RE: Folic Acid and the Hand of Hope
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
Isn’t the vitamin B12 the one that may be an issue for vegetarian people if they don’t pay attention to it? As I am not vegetarian I don’t remember the information, I cannot double check this right now.
Coming back closer to the topic, do you have quantitative estimates for other parts of the world, on top of those provided for the US. I am wondering how many babies are actually affected. Considering the US, we are discussing numbers of the size of half a permille. That’s not that large (of course, it is awful when it happens).
PS: Samuel Armas' story was an amazing story to read about ;)
0
0
0.000
Yes I was going to ask about that, too. My interpretation is that there's probably many forms of vitamin b12, and folate is one of them, and it's not the one vegetarians have an issue with. So let's wait for gentleshaid to solve the mystery.
Let's do this. Hopefully the answer will come (tagging again @gentleshaid ;) ).
Folate is actually b9, not b12. B12 is what vegetarians may be deficient of. I have made a bit of clarification above.
Sorry, totally forgot to respond appropriately to this.
First, folate is actually vitamin B9 and not B12 (I have made that correction above). It also appears one does work for the other.
Then to your question, yes. B12 is found in mostly in meat and meat products (along with b9, anyways), so definitely, it follows logically that vegetarians may have issues with it.
Unfortunately, there are no enough data for other areas of world as far as neural tube defects are concerned. However, there are reports of around 500,000 cases global annual. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4827875/
Thanks for the answer, which fixes my thoughts for the B12 thingie, even if it is now irrelevant ;)
For the rest, I was imagining such an answer, as those studies are hard to achieve globally. Thanks for the link anyways. It covers at the end 24 years worldwide, which is not that bad, and provides results sufficient to get an idea even if the error bars are large.
It was a pleasure to do that for my Prof! :)
Even in vegeterian, due to less vit b12, anemia occurs so called megaloblastic anemia. This anemia can also be seen in patient with less vit b9 so called folic acid deficiency. First make sure it’s vit b12 or b9 deficiency because treating people with folic acid in case of vit12 deficient can worsen the neurological symptoms more of the patient.
P.S. Both are used in DNA synthesis .
Thanks for those specifications! Please note that I am by no mean in medicine, so that I am a complete newbie with this respect. I have just read a few things here and there ;)