Vitamin B Alzheimer's: Could Help Prevent Dementia

A new study suggests that Vitamin-B could help prevent Alzheimer's disease by reducing the loss of grey matter in vulnerable regions of the brain.

British researchers studied 150 elderly people with mild cognitive impairment, giving B-vitamin treatment to half of those monitored for two years. The findings show that brain cells of those who did not receive B-vitamins atrophied seven times as much as those who did receive the vitamin supplementation.

The professor at the Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research at the University of Queensland, Juergen Goetz,  said the results were "promising," but that longer and larger trials would be needed to understand the impact B-vitamins could have to the disease.

He noted that the study found B-vitamins had benefited only those people with high levels of homocysteine, an amino acid commonly associated with an increased risk of many diseases.

''I think the good thing about this is that obviously a simple supplement does some good, even if it's only in a subset of the population,'' Professor Goetz.

''It's promising, but it doesn't provide us with a final answer,'' Professor Goetz said.

According to the Mayo Clinic, Dementia and Alzheimer's disease are now the third most common cause of death in Australia, accounting for 7 percent of all deaths.

In 2011, the latest year for which data is available, 9864 Australians died of dementia and Alzheimer's disease, up from 4634 in 2002.

Two-thirds of those who died from dementia and Alzheimer's disease were women, and most were 75 or older.

The findings for the were published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.