Vitamin B12 supplementation and cognitive scores in geriatric patients having Mild Cognitive Impairment

摘要

Background: The Neurodegenerative diseases are increasingly affecting the elderly with a severe impact on their brain health. There is a wide gap in supplementation based studies for increasing the cognition levels of the geriatric population especially in the developing countries like India, which are at extreme risk of developing neurological disorders. Vitamin B12 herein has caught much attention lately for improving the cognitive status. Literature has linked the possibility of alleviating neurological disorders in the elderly with effective vitamin B12 management. Abundant animal and human models have proved that supplementation of vitamin B12 is beneficial for the restoration of cognitive functions. Objective: To supplement vitamin B12 deficient mild cognitively impaired geriatric patients with injectable doses of vitamin B12 followed by impact evaluation.Methods: Screening of the mild cognitively impaired patients was carried out using the Mini-Mental State Examination and Yamaguchi Fox Pigeon Imitation test. Baseline information was elicited from the patients residing in urban Vadodara (a district in the state of Gujarat), India. This included socio-demographic, medical and drug history, anthropometric and physical activity pattern as well as biochemical parameters comprising of serum vitamin B12 and glycated haemoglobin profile. A sub-sample of 60 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) demonstrating severe vitamin B12 deficiency were conveniently enrolled for injectable doses of Vitamin B12 in the dosage of 1,000 μg every day for one week, followed by 1,000 μg every week for 4 weeks & finishing with 1,000 μg for the remaining 4 months. Post six months intervention all the parameters were elicited. Results: Vitamin B12 supplementation resulted in a significant (p<0.001) improvement in the MMSE scores of the patients with a rise of 9.63% in the total patients. Gender-wise division also highlighted a significant increase (p<0.001) in the scores by 6.79% and 12.46% in overall males and females and a 10.20% and 8.24% rise for young-old (60-69 yrs) and old- old (70-85 yrs) categories, respectively. As a result, 27 patients progressed towards the?category from the MCI state being assessed by MMSE scores. In the same manner, YGFPIT too demonstrated a 38% increase in normal with 35% males, 42% females, 41% young–old and 31% old-old moving to normal status. Thus, a total number of 28 patients progressed to the normal condition as per YGFPIT.Conclusion: Hence, vitamin B12 supplementation was found significantly effective in placing the serum vitamin B12 of MCI patients from the deficiency state to sufficient levels and in turn increased their performance in MMSE and YFPIT scores.?Keywords: Mild Cognitive Impairment, vitamin B12, geriatrics, cognition