Gruesome Facts

Vitamin B₁₂ deficiency was fatal before 1926.  Pernicious anaemia (PA) was described around 1859 by Addison[1-3] but people with PA died within three years and many sooner.

Bleeding dogs nearly to death

People were already working on cures for anaemia/anemia, which is blood loss. Scientists had been bleeding dogs close to death to mimic anaemia in humans, and had found that feeling these dogs with liver help them get better more quickly.  Liver worked on humans with anaemia, and also on humans with PA[4].  This was the cure people had been waiting for.

We now know that the reason for this was a very different.  Liver contains iron, which is needed by the body to create haemoglobin, which is what makes up the important part of blood.

Liver also contains vitamin B₁₂, which is needed for all kinds of things in the body and when the body doesn’t have enough B₁₂ it gets problems from deficiency, which can include PA, and/or nervous disorders (depression, confusion, paralysis, multiple sclerosis).

Eating vomit

Some people didn’t respond to liver.  For some reason someone suspected maybe it was to do with something in the stomach.  The researcher ate some liver, then shortly afterwards vomited it back up.  The pernicious anaemia sufferers then ate the liver, and found that they could absorb B₁₂ from the liver once it was covered in stomach juice. 

Obviously this wasn’t a sustainable solution, but when you’re about to die you will try just about anything. 

Out of this work we found out about the intrinsic factor (IF)[4].

Drinking Poo

Vitamin B₁₂ is manufactured by bacteria and other microbes.  Most animals have microbes in their guts, especially animals that eat grass and leaves because animals can’t digest the cellulose in grass and leaves.  However only ruminants (cows, sheep, goats, camels, giraffe) have the bacteria in their stomach where the contents can go into the small intestine to be used.  For example, rabbits have lots of microbes in their hind gut, and have to eat the sticky green poos they make every so often, to get their vitamins – this is coprophagia.

Humans also have lots of microbes in our colon, and Sheila Callender managed to show two things at once in an elegant experiment in 1958[5]: we have enough microbes in the colon to produce B₁₂, but we don’t absorb it from the colon.   She collected their stools, made water extracts of them, and fed the water extracts back to the patients.  This quickly cured the vitamin B deficiency, proving that:

•  the human colon bacteria make a lot of vitamin B₁₂
• There is no vitamin B₁₂ absorption across to:
• Faecal Cobalamins from an individual with vitamin B₁₂ deficiency factor that individual is sufficient to cure that vitamin B₁₂ deficiency[6]

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Citations

1.            Addison, T., Anaemia: disease of the supra-renal capsules. London Medical Gazette 1849. 43: p. 517-518.

2.            Baboir, B.M. and H.F. Bunn, Pernicious Anaemia, in Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. 2005. p. 601-607.

3.            Biermer,A., Über eine Form von progressiver perniciöser Anämie. Correspondenz-Blatt Schw. Ärzte., 1872. 2: p. 15-17.

4.            Wikipedia.Vitamin B12. Wikipedia  2009  [cited 2009 Oct 2]; Description of Vitamin B12 (cobalamin) including description of discovery of cure for Pernicious anaemia and structure of B12]. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12.

5.            Callender, S.T. and G.H. Spray, Latent pernicious anaemia. Br J Haematol, 1962. 8:p. 230.

6.            Herbert, V., Vitamin B12 - an overview, in Vitamin B12 deficiency, V. Herbert, Editor. 1999, Royal Society of Medicine Press: Key West, Florida. p.1-8.