Getting More of This Vitamin Could Protect Your Brain

Forget Me Not: Dementia is influenced by a long list of factors, some of which we can’t control, like age and genetics. One area you can control — and that’s increasingly thought to play a major role in dementia prevention — is nutrition. New research adds vitamin B12 to the list of nutrients worth paying attention to.

The Study: Published this month in Frontiers in Nutrition, the study analyzed electronic health records from more than 258,000 adults ages 50 and older. Researchers compared people with persistently low B12 levels (below 300 pg/mL) with those whose levels were between 300 and 900 pg/mL. Over up to 10 years, the low-B12 group had a 33% higher hazard of dementia. In absolute terms, dementia was diagnosed in 2.93% of people with low B12 and 2.31% of those in the reference group. The association was even stronger among people with outright B12 deficiency (defined as below 200 pg/mL).

The Takeaway: If you’re concerned about your long-term cognitive health — something we should all be tuned into — B12 status is something to discuss with your healthcare provider, particularly if you have risk factors for deficiency.

Keep in Mind: This was a retrospective observational study. Even though researchers used statistical matching to make the groups more comparable, other differences between people with low and normal B12 could still explain some of the association.