Artigo Revisado por pares

Vitamin B 12 Deficiency and Psychiatric Illness

1967; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 113; Issue: 496 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1192/bjp.113.496.252

ISSN

1472-1465

Autores

Ralph Shulman,

Tópico(s)

Neurological and metabolic disorders

Resumo

Many psychiatric symptoms have been described in pernicious anaemia, including depression, manic excitement, paranoid states, confusional episodes, and dementia. Although vitamin B 12 deficiency is known to produce neurological symptoms there is much less certainty about its role in producing mental symptoms. Despite this uncertainty, it has been asserted that carrying out vitamin B 12 assays on psychiatric patients will enable doctors to cure for good severe disabling disease which otherwise may end in chronicity (Edwin et al. , 1966). Routine examinations to exclude pernicious anaemia have been advocated for all psychiatric patients (Strachan and Henderson, 1965; Hunter and Matthews, 1965). A prudent preliminary is a critical evaluation of the causal relationship between vitamin B 12 deficiency and individual psychiatric syndromes.

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