thiamine deficiency

Readers of this website must surely be aware that the American medical profession completely resists the possibility of vitamin deficiency as a cause of any disease in America. This is so deeply ingrained that anybody claiming such a diagnosis is considered a fool. This seems to be particularly addressed to the classic vitamin B1 deficiency disease, long known as beriberi. It is unfortunate that we use a Chinese word that, translated to English means: I can’t. I can’t. It is the expression of the profound associated fatigue. There is good reason for denial of its modern existence. It has always been common in countries where rice has been the dietary staple. It existed unrecognized for centuries. In fact, the incredible intricacies of this complex disease took many years to unravel, much of which was performed in China and Japan where there was an obvious interest. It was a series of important historical events that led to its final solution and the history is fascinating. I really think that it is an example of the proverb “those that forget history are condemned to repeat it”. For example, groups of factory workers developed their first symptoms of the disease together after an exposure to sunlight. “Epidemics” of the disease occurred in the summer months. It was only natural that the investigators at that time had concluded that beriberi was an infectious disease. Their search for the responsible micro-organism was a futile endeavor.

The explanation can only be provided from modern knowledge. We now know that ultraviolet light imposes a stress on the human body, requiring mobilization of energy in order to meet it. For example, a car requires more energy to climb a hill. The hill is an analogy for “stress”. The groups of workers described above were in a state of mild deficiency of the vitamin and the stress of the sunlight precipitated full-blown disease, simply because of lack of extra energy required to adapt to the stress. Thus, any form of stress has to be considered in relationship to genetic risk and nutrition if and when the symptoms of beriberi are precipitated.

With this preamble, let me describe some of the clinical experiences that I have been exposed to. First of all, I was lucky enough to be able to think about health and disease in my position in a multi-specialty clinic. I came to the realization that the human body is a wonderful “machine” where the coordination of 70 to 100 trillion live units called cells, depends on chemical energy that has to be transduced to electric energy in order to carry out cellular function. Not only that, I had recognized something that is taken for granted today, that brain cells have an extravagant use of energy. The case that precipitated my lifelong interest in thiamine (vitamin B1) was a six-year-old child who had intermittent brain disease that had confounded all the studies and tests applied in the search for a solution. To put it simply, it was a biochemical approach that showed that he and his brother had a genetically determined condition that, for the most part, allowed them to pursue a relatively normal childhood life. However, each episode of spontaneously resolving brain disease left a little bit more permanent damage. The disease was invariably precipitated by an exposure to a form of stress, represented by a simple viral infection, on one occasion by a mild head injury, and even after an inoculation.

With the help of John Blass M.D. who was working at the National Institutes of Health, we were able to prove that these boys represented the first example of what came to be known as vitamin dependency. In order to prevent brain disease, both of these children required enormous doses of thiamine, but if they were affected by any form of stress such as a viral infection, the daily dose of the vitamin would have to be doubled or tripled in order to prevent a brain disease episode. I came to understand that under these circumstances I was using thiamine as a drug and that it was not a matter of simple vitamin replacement. It was an early example of epigenetics, the relatively new science concerning the way nutrition and lifestyle affect our genes.

You have to understand a very simple idea: thiamine and magnesium are known as “cofactors” to a series of enzymes that represent the machinery of energy production. Both the cofactors are derived from nutrition and have to be bound to their enzymes by a genetically determined mechanism. Not only that: thiamine has to bind to a protein known as a thiamine transporter. The transporter is also genetically determined and conveys thiamine into the cell. All of this takes place in thousands of minute organelles called mitochondria. I refer to these organelles as the “engines” of our cells. That is why glucose can be compared with gasoline in a car engine. Like an excess of gasoline chokes the engine, an excess of glucose chokes mitochondria. Thiamine and magnesium can be compared to a spark plug that ignites the gasoline. Perhaps the reader can begin to understand that this vitamin deficiency disease can literally develop any symptom anywhere in the body according to the distribution of the deficiency and its degree. The brain, heart and nervous system are the most oxygen demanding organs so it is not surprising that they are the first to be involved in thiamine deficiency.

Additional Cases of Thiamine Deficiency

My colleagues knew of my interest and although I was a pediatrician I was asked to comment on the following case. A 67-year-old anesthesiologist at a hospital in Columbus, Ohio came down one day with “a heart attack”. He was subjected to catheterization of the heart that was found to be completely normal. Meanwhile, his son was a medical student and having researched his father’s symptoms, he claimed that the disease was beriberi. The patient was referred to Cleveland Clinic and I was asked to comment on the situation. I found that when he went to his garage to drive to the hospital he would be afflicted by a series of dry heaves. This alone would immediately call to question the possibility of thiamine deficiency. He would give the anesthetic for a series of cases, after which he would go to the pediatric ward and cut himself a large piece of chocolate cake. On returning home, he was too tired to eat dinner and would go to bed, only to repeat the performance the next day. He returned to Columbus with the advice that the patient’s son was correct. I never received a follow-up and don’t know how he was treated but I later heard that he had died. I suspect that he was, in fact, given thiamine in too large a dose that overwhelmed his fragile metabolism.

My next experience was with a brilliant pathologist who was well known in the specialty. She told me that she had extreme fatigue. In fact, a few days previously she had been driving to work but felt so ill that she had turned round and gone home. I discovered that she had a chocolate box in every room in the house. As she went around from room to room she would consume one of the chocolates in each box. I advised her to stop doing this and take a supplement of thiamine, whereupon she rapidly recovered. Note that this was purely a hedonistic urge and had nothing to do with her three meals a day routine.

Ondine’s Curse

A mythological character was a water nymph who supposedly lived in a puddle. She fell in love with a mortal who jilted her and she cursed him with the loss of automatic breathing when he was asleep. There is a disease known as “Ondine’Curse” where this form of breathing ceases, usually at night and the patient dies. So one day I was having lunch with one of the Ear Nose Throat surgeons who knew of my interest. He had seen a woman in the intensive care unit who had stopped breathing and he was called to put in a tracheostomy. He suggested that I should view the case. She was under the care of a rheumatologist and she had had a history of periods of unconsciousness as well as joint pain. In using my knowledge of chemistry, I was able to show that she had thiamine deficiency and began treatment with thiamine.

During her clinical recovery she developed a profound anemia which proved to be due to a deficiency of folate. The importance of this is that her brain was affected by thiamine deficiency but when she was treated with the vitamin, her energy dependent metabolism increased. This exposed a previously adequate sufficiency of folate related to her slow metabolism. The increasingly efficient metabolism stimulated by thiamine required more folate to meet the new demand. She was a chronic smoker that had contributed to the metabolic changes in brain function that precipitated a disease that had gone unrecognized for years. I remember visiting the rheumatologist to ask her whether we could conference the patient to expose this information. She obviously thought that it was an absurd idea and refused to consider a meeting of physicians for further discussion. I learned something else from this patient. She was discharged from the hospital taking supplements of thiamine and folate. When she returned for review, the paralysis in her legs was worse and she had developed a rash on her arms that may occur occasionally in association with deficiency of vitamin B12. It has long been known that B12 and/or folate deficiency could individually be responsible for pernicious anemia (PA). However it had also been known that folate supplementation could not be given on its own for folate deficient PA. It had to be given with vitamin B12 and I had forgotten this. I gave her an injection of vitamin B12 and over the next few days she had some fever and muscle pain but the rash disappeared and she felt better.

The Complexity of Treating Vitamin Deficiencies

I provide these details to show that an understanding of vitamin deficiency disease introduces complexities that require study. When she began receiving thiamine and became clinically worse, it would be easy to blame it as a “side effect” that required administration of the vitamin to be stopped. A physician must first of all have enough knowledge to suspect the possibility and then apply the necessary tests. Obviously, if the collective psychology refuses to accept that possibility, the complaints of the patient, together with the clinical observations of the physician, will be treated symptomatically without a full recognition of the underlying cause. My exposure to a case for which I had no medical responsibility provides an example, for I was merely a visitor. I heard from her that she had been diagnosed with heart disease. She went on to say that her heart rate had dropped to 30 beats a minute, an extraordinarily dangerous situation for which she had received the drug atropine. Atropine blocks the nerve mechanism into the heart, thus controlling the danger symptomatically. She had then been given a diuretic drug and she went through an agonizing 24 hours of almost continual urination. It was clear to me that this was a dramatic exposure of thiamine deficiency heart and nerve disease. She had in fact “wet beriberi”. It has been referred to as “wet” because of the profound collection of fluid in the body and that had been treated symptomatically with the diuretic. The point that I am trying to make is that although the patient had been treated successfully with drugs, the underlying cause had not been recognized. These are uncommon cases, but I am claiming that they are the end-point of years of nutritional and medical neglect and yes, medical ignorance.

Because thiamine deficiency has its major effect in the lower part of the brain, the earliest effects are those of a deregulated autonomic nervous system (ANS). The reader will remember that the ANS conducts the traffic of body organs under the command of the brain. It consists of two basic systems, one of which stimulates action and is called sympathetic. The other one stimulates rest and is known as the parasympathetic. An early symptom of thiamine deficiency is an overdrive in the parasympathetic system, whereas at a later stage of the disease there is usually an overdrive of the sympathetic system. Accepting this factor, it can easily be seen that the patient described above, whose heart rate was drastically slowed, had been endangered because one of the nerves to the heart had carried an overdrive of parasympathetic activity. This, accompanied by a huge collection of fluid in the body, was characteristic enough to look further for the ultimate diagnosis.

Common Presentations of Thiamine Deficiency: The Walking Sick

Looking back at the history of finding the solution to this disease, it is known to have a long morbidity and a low mortality but with a long life of chronic illness gradually leading to some form of mental or physical crippling. In the elderly patient it is often attributed solely to aging. In the 1940s an experiment was carried out in a group of human subjects who were provided with a moderately deficient thiamine diet. Their symptoms were characteristic of those that are presently regarded by most physicians today as psychosomatic. They were irritable, quarrelsome and experienced heart palpitations, headaches, loss of appetite, insomnia, diarrhea or constipation, chronic fatigue and/or intolerance to heat and cold. The vast majority of patients that I treated when I was in practice had a polysymptomatic presentation of this nature, many of whom had been doctor shopping without relief. I was dealing with what I call the “walking sick”, a large group of patients that are haunting the offices of physicians throughout America. Sometimes they had been given a named diagnosis but had not benefited from drug treatment.

The behavioral characteristics of children, particularly those with ADD or ADHD, are dietary in origin, often coupled with some form of genetic risk, not the least of which is superior intelligence. They are being treated symptomatically, but I offer the possibility that failing to recognize these symptoms as nutritional in character may be a failure to recognize them as the forerunner of chronic neurological or heart disease. It is a reflection of high calorie food ingestion overwhelming the action of non-caloric nutrients that enable the necessary synthesis of cellular energy for function, particularly in the brain. In our book “Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition”, we note that our present culture is cursed with a hedonistic ingestion of high calorie malnutrition, responsible for much loss of health. In fact, I have suggested that it is the equivalent of what happened to the ancient Romans whose wine tasted sweet because of lead infiltration from the glaze used in their wine containing jars. They did not know that they were suffering lead poisoning. We don’t seem to grasp the danger of sugar. Each symptom, as it appears, is treated symptomatically with a medication. Rarely is there an interest by the physician concerning diet, particularly the ingestion of empty calories consumed socially. Given the challenge of hedonism, it seems to be part of life joy, particularly in the elderly, to indulge in all the dietary aspects of sweet, sweeter and sweetest. However, it is inappropriate to fail in recognizing the symptoms that might or might not develop as a result. If one or more of the many symptoms is recognized and the patient informed, it is then his/her choice to make the necessary changes.

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Photo: Seated Youth by Wilhelm Lehmbruck 1917. Edited. Wilhelm Lehmbruck, PDM-owner, via Wikimedia Commons.

This article was published originally on April 11, 2019.

Rest in peace Derrick Lonsdale, May 2024. 

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A Case of Classic Beriberi in America Diet and Medication Induced Thiamine Deficiency – Dry Beriberi Beriberi: The Great Imitator From the Legs to the Heart: Historical Descriptions of Beriberi