Vitamins are not as harmless as you think. Improper supplementation can lead to serious health problems. 86-year-old Australian can’t walk after an overdose of vitamin B6 (pyridoxine). Her daughter Alison Taylor told her misadventure to ABC Radio Melbourne on August 4, 2022.
Vitamin B6 overdose: progressive loss of mobility
Alison Taylor recalls on Australian radio that her father started gradually losing sensation in his legs. He was eventually hospitalized when he ended up in the i inability to walk.
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“We’ve taken him to all kinds of different specialists. He’s had a number of neurologists, he’s had IRMhe had CT scansanything you could think of to determine why he was losing his mobility“, explained Alison Taylor. It is finally after 9 weeks of hospitalization that the diagnosis has been made: the octogenarian suffers from a significant overdose of vitamin B6. This compound plays a key role in the metabolism of carbohydrates, amino acids and lipids or the proper functioning of the nervous system.
In the doctors’ own words, the vitamin B6 level was “extraordinary”.
Vitamin B6: a dose 70 times higher than the recommendations
Four years earlier, the senior’s attending physician had prescribed the taking 50mg of vitamin B6, after a blood test revealed a deficiency.
While the recommended daily amount of vitamin B6 is 1.7 milligrams for men over 50he took the dose of 50 milligrams prescribed as well as’a magnesium supplement that also contained 50 milligrams of B6.
Furthermore, the breakfast cereals that the man ate every morning were also enriched. It was thus estimated thathe was consuming 70 times the recommended dose.
This chronic excess gradually damaged leg nerves of the octogenarian and led to his loss of mobility.
“Twelve months ago, he was driving. He is now in a retirement home and in a wheelchair,” laments his daughter Alison Taylor. However, she hopes he can move again in about 6 months, when his vitamin B6 levels return to normal.
“There is no indication that he will start to walk as independently as before, but he may not need to be in a wheelchair,” she says.
Loss of mobility is not the only sign of vitamin B6 overdose. Medisite lists other disorders in pictures: