[Handbook of Clinical Neurology] Neurologic Aspects of Systemic Disease Part II Volume 120 || Hydrosoluble vitamins

✍ Scribed by Chawla, Jasvinder

• Book ID: 121436080
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 1004 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 0702040878
• ISSN: 0072-9752
• DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-7020-4087-0.00059-0

✦ Synopsis

Most of the work on vitamins goes back to the early twentieth century. Vitamin supplementation fell into dispute after the studies reported in the middle of the century. Very little clinical research has been done since then and major medical journals have consistently rejected what clinical research has been reported. The use of thiamin and its disulfide derivatives, in particular, is much neglected in Western medicine. Beriberi was described in the 17th century when Brontius in the Dutch East Indies reported cases of sensorimotor polyneuropathy. Thiamin was one of the earliest vitamins to be discovered and synthesized. It was originally spelled thiamine, and although this spelling is still often used, the alternative spelling of thiamin was adopted when it was found that it was not an amine. Thiamin deficiency is the major cause of beriberi, a disease that had affected humans for centuries. The name Kakke was the term used for the disease in Japan and this word can be found in documents as early as 808 . In 1890, Eijkman found that polished rice, given to pigeons, caused polyneuritis and the histopathology was similar to that seen in humans in beriberi. Funk and Cooper isolated an "antiberiberi factor" from rice polishing in 1910 and this was crystallized in 1926 and called Vitamin (Jansen and Donath, 1926). The first national statistics on mortality came from Japanese literature in 1920's and showed a death rate of 30 per 100,000. This dropped to 0.5 in 1959 after its nutritional association was discovered (Inouye and Kastura, 1965).Pellagra was seemingly unknown prior to the introduction of maize into Europe from the New World. In the US, pellagra became epidemic among economically challenged inhabitants of some southern states in the