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Women's eye sight restored after Vit A supplementation?
I just read this article: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1683003/vitamin-a-deficiency-symptoms-floaters-visual-decline
Woman was suspected of having glaucoma, but apparently it was just vitamin A deficiency.
Unfortunately, they do not link to the actual case study, so I could not figure out how they came to this conclusion and how they diagnosed the vit A deficiency exactly.
I would love to hear how this could be explained. Is it possible that she was suffering from vit A toxicity and that the vit A supplementation just flushed out the old vit A stores in her liver?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451993622002171
Here's the study. Frustratingly, they do not present any kind of dietary history for the patient. Her Vitamin A serum levels were normal 5 days after the initial diagnosis of deficiency, and there were no records of deficiency prior to that. It sounds like the authors completely assumed that she had been on a Vitamin A deficient diet based on clinical measures and without any knowledge of dietary history. They attribute the normal serum value to an improved diet in the US prior to her appointment, but again, they have no dietary history while she was in the US either.
Personally, I still think it is possible to have Vitamin A deficiency that leads to eye problems, but in this case study the evidence is very thin for a diagnosis of deficiency. She did appear to improve after an initial dose of Vitamin A, but then they gave her iron and zinc in addition to the Vitamin A, which introduces two confounding variables...maybe she was zinc deficient and therefore deficient in retinol binding protein and unable to mobilize Vitamin A from the liver to the eyes?
I doubt she had Vitamin A toxicity though if the general assumption is that Haitian people are malnourished.
There is someone with a very low serum retinol who was having problems with his eyes. Adding back in vA has reversed the problems. He now thinks there is VAD. However, this person also has a diet that is low in other nutrients and one of these is choline.
I’ve always thought the main point of this work should be that excess vA is a problem and that it is common not rare.
I dunno, I think it is a lot more complicated than that. To be sure we would have to know the diet, which was not presented in the study. Malnourishment from my understanding does not equal not being A toxic. If one does not eat adequate protein and calories (and probably micronutrients as well) the liver is less likely to keep detox up, if the diet contain more A than it can get rid of. Theoretically it is possible to be malnourished and still intoxicated. Especially with genetic differences.
And I do have to get back to Grant, being "no A" for 8 years with improved vision, not worse vision. He would probably be dead by now if vitamin A deficiency was a thing. Or at least have worse eyesight.
What I still would like to unserstand is, if someone has a toxicity, and eats the poison and gets better, how long does it take before it gets worse again. Because that has to happen at some point...
Here’s another paper where they’ve concluded that RA (“the active form of vA”) is causing the degeneration of photoreceptors in retinitis pigmentosa (RP), AMD and is thereby slowly destroying our vision. Yet, we also have the long standing claim from Wald et al that vA is absolutely essential for vision. How do we reconcile these two directly opposing positions?
Retinoic acid inhibitors mitigate vision loss in a mouse model of retinal degeneration
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm4643
In Fig. 1. Disulfiram and BMS 493 reduce signaling through the RA pathway in the degenerated retina.
in their report showing what almost all researchers claim to be RA “modulating gene expressions”, but I’m quite sure that it is the wrong determination.
Rather, I think it’s simply the RA poisoning /damaging the DNA resulting in the cell; subsequently the cell will just build defective proteins for the rest of its life. It’s the resulting defective proteins that cause the malformed tissue.
Night Blindness and Ancient Remedy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4348990/
Kind of difficult to argue with the convergent solution for night blindness, by a number of major cultures, being liver consumption.
Liver has a ton of other things besides A. Was it the A, or something else, like choline? Or B vitamins? Or all of them?
There are human studies showing that Vitamin A supplementation reverses night blindness within hours (see attached 1938 study by Wald, for example). There are proposed mechanisms by which this happens (Vitamin A being involved in the production of rhodopsin) which have been studied. Vitamin A was found to be present in all eyes containing rhodopsin...are people here really going to conclude that ALL eyes are toxic with Vitamin A?
To my knowledge, none of the other nutrients in liver have been associated with nightblindness or its remedy. If you know of any studies that show that choline or B vitamin supplementation alone corrected night vision, please do share.
Reductionism can lead to all kinds of problems, but this is an instance in which it seems to have worked well: provide an isolated Vitamin A supplement, see night blindness disappear within hours (less than an hour of ingestion in the Wald study, which is actually incredible the body can absorb and transport it so quickly). It works with both beta-carotene and animal forms of Vitamin A. Causation is reasonably established there.
I'm all for skepticism and thinking critically about anything we assume is established in the sciences, but if you have to tie yourself in knots to counter the general direction in which decades of research all point, you are working really hard to massage your own bias in the face of evidence to the contrary, which is antiscientific. There are a lot of people here and on Smith's site that WANT so much for Vitamin A to just be purely toxic and non-essential, probably because it would make the world easier to understand, but guess what...natural systems are extremely complex, and you can't just oversimplify things because you find complexity to be confusing.
I've said it before...there are thousands and thousands of scientists who have worked on topics like this over decades, and to attempt to overturn the generally agreed upon conclusions is going to take more than just claiming that a mouse study had poor methodology, or measuring your serum Vitamin A levels in the absence of liver biopsies and quantifying Vitamin A intake by directly measuring what is in the food you eat. I do find it interesting that Grant has gone as long as he has on his diet without developing symptoms of an overt deficiency in Vitamin A (I'm actually more interested that he hasn't developed a Vitamin C deficiency on a carb-based diet), but he hasn't actually proved anything since we don't know how much Vitamin A is in the food he's consuming, and how much is stored in his liver. Not to mention, he HAS experienced vision problems that suggest the beginnings of Vitamin A deficiency, and I hope he is honest enough to continue to inform us if he has them again in the future.
There's probably a reason that Vitamin A was the first vitamin described by modern science...it is the most critical for any animal that relies on vision, humans being one of them, and there was a long history of deficiency and correcting deficiency in humans. Sorry folks, get over your grudges, your body does need some Vitamin A to function.
Uploaded files:I do agree with you on the complexity part. This, we humans, are highly complex. Science is very limited on so many levels (not to mentioned corrupt) and often focus on a mass and not individual fallouts, also on single variables and not multiple. The body works as a whole, ao many factors needed to function. I'd like to ask the question, why did her eyesight improve? Was it because it stopped "detoxing" thus made her better, or because she was "deficient"? Did it get worse again later on? Is A a poison only if the body has another nutritional imbalance/genetic fault? Is it a poison only when overdosing? Is it a poison due to genetic variables in some individuals? Is it a poison when missing certain components, or when adding certain components?
Either way in this particular case it is impossible to know as dietary history was not provided. Also it would still be speculatuon without serum and liver biopsy showing if she was deficient or not.
@wavygravygadzooks "I do find it interesting that Grant has gone as long as he has on his diet without developing symptoms of an overt deficiency in Vitamin A "
I think it's because he doesn't have much sun exposure and because his metabolism slowed down( or at least I think that his metabolism is very slow when he says he eats like 1500kcal and is not losing weight..) I think if he would live in Costa Rica with Paul Saladino and doing what he is doing he would deplete his vit A stores in the liver 10 times faster.. I also agree that one blood test for vit A in serum once a year doesn't give a full picture.