From: nodrog@byron.u.washington.edu (Gordon Rubenfeld)
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Mega-vitamin supplementation
Date: 27 Jan 1993 09:26:15 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Distribution: world
Reply-To: nodrog@u.washington.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: byron.u.washington.edu

While doing a medline search to answer one of the recent posts I came
across this article.  I thought the abstract was worth posting.  I haven't
pulled the article itself yet, but will.  I'm sure this is a FERD
(frequently encountered religious debate) but are there ANY decent
(randomized _double-blinded_ human studies with reasonable follow up times
and hard endpoints) studies that have positively evaluated mega dose
supplements.

AU   Lemoine-A.  Le-Devehat-C.
TI   Clinical conditions requiring elevated dosages of vitamins.
RF   REVIEW ARTICLE: 311 REFS.
SO   Int-J-Vitam-Nutr-Res-Suppl.  1989.  30.  P 129-47.
LG   Eng.
AB   With a normal and varied food intake, the vitamin supply is often
     sufficient to avoid vitamin deficiency. Since synthetic vitamins have
     become available, it has become possible to take with one dose the
     amount of vitamins normally taken up from food in one year. In these
     pharmacological doses vitamins must therefore be considered as drugs.
     And in pharmacological doses, their actions are often different and
     not directly linked to their physiological activity. Two types of
     pathologic state are unquestionably the concern of vitaminotherapy:
     More or less specific and intense vitamin deficiencies: Rickets,
     scurvy, beri beri, pellagra, vitamin deficiency related to alcohol
     consumption, polyneuritis, encephalopathy, malabsorption,
     mucoviscidosis, etc. Genetic defects of vitamin metabolism:
     Prescriptions for these cases represent only a tiny part of the
     vitamin pharmaceutic market. The prescription of vitamins as
     adjuvants in other pathologic states without vitamin deficiency, such
     as neurological pains, psychosis, prevention of common cold,
     alopecia, anemia, asthenia, carpal tunnel defect, etc., is frequent.
     The results may be good; however, in some cases, the efficacy is due
     to chance or placebo effect, and there is no scientific or
     experimental evidence of beneficial activity. At the moment, the
     pharmacological vitamin research is very active. New products with
     vitamin-like structures are being synthesized for specialized
     therapeutic applications. They will in the near future probably
     replace elevated and mega-doses for clinical prescription, except, of
     course, for the treatment of vitamin deficiency. On the other hand,
     the use of multivitamin preparations in nutritional dosage will
     greatly increase.
MJ   VITAMINS: ad.
MN   HUMAN.  PRESCRIPTIONS-DRUG.  VITAMINS: tu.
PT   JOURNAL-ARTICLE.  REVIEW.  REVIEW-LITERATURE.
-- 
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nodrog@byron.u.washington.edu     |University of Washington Medical Center
Gordon D. Rubenfeld               |Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care
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Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition