The case is described of a 39-year-old man with previously undiagnosed chronic schizophrenia and with bilateral keratomalacia secondary to his bizarre diet. He presented with a perforation of the right cornea which required an emergency penetrating keratoplasty. The difficulties of clinical management of a patient with an overt psychosis and the use of serum retinol levels to monitor treatment ...

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a serious and widespread public health problem in developing countries. We conducted a nationwide food consumption and nutrition survey in Nigeria to help fomulate strategies to address VAD, among other deficiencies. One objectives was to assess the vitamin A status of children <5 y old. A total of 6480 households with a mother and child <5 y old were randomly samp...

Gari, a fermented and dried semolina made from cassava, is one of the most common foods in West Africa. Recently introduced biofortified yellow cassava containing provitamin A carotenoids could help tackle vitamin A deficiency prevalent in those areas. However there are concerns because of the low retention of carotenoids during gari processing compared to other processes (e.g. boiling). The ai...

A competitive protein-binding assay for 25-hydroxy vitamin D (25-OHD) in saliva has been established by adaptation of that previously described for 25-OHD in serum (Fairney et al. 1979). Random values of salivary 25-OHD in patients attending hospital for venesection showed a wide range of results (105-1000 pg/ml, n 55). These values corresponded to 1.2% of the total serum values with which they...

We have established a targeted loss-of-function mutation in the RXR alpha gene in the mouse germ line that results in embryonic lethality between E13.5 and E16.5 when bred to homozygosity. The major defect responsible for lethality is hypoplastic development of the ventricular chambers of the heart, which is manifest as a grossly thinned ventricular wall with concurrent defects in ventricular s...

Previous reports, reviewed in a recent symposium,2 suggest that infection of the mucous membranes in vitamin-A-deficient animals is secondary to the well-known epithelial changes such animals display and that early in the course of this avitaminosis resistance to infection is reduced. A study" 7 designed primarily to follow pathologic changes associated with a prolonged, mild, chronic vitamin-A...

Since the demonstration of the dual nature of vitamin B in 1926 (1, 2) which has been amply confirmed in recent years (35), there has been no satisfactory method for the separation of the heat-labile antineuritic (vitamin B,) from the more heat-stable growth-promoting (vitamin B,) component of the vitamin B complex. There are numerous experiments recorded in the lit,erature indicating that at l...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of large doses of vitamin C in the treatment of the common cold. STUDY DESIGN Double-blind, randomised clinical trial with four intervention arms: vitamin C at daily doses of 0.03g ("placebo"), 1 g, 3g, or 3g with additives ("Bio-C") taken at onset of a cold and for the following two days. PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING 400 healthy volunteers were recruited from ...

Vitamin A 129 dubious but in practice the results are very good-partly in fact because errors tend to be compensated ! Correction procedures devised specially to meet difficulties over vitamin A assays are actually theoretically safer in most of the many other situations in which they have been used ! I suppose there are lessons here as well as an element of irony. The problem of the site and m...

How the immune system adapts to malnutrition to sustain immunity at barrier surfaces, such as the intestine, remains unclear. Vitamin A deficiency is one of the most common micronutrient deficiencies and is associated with profound defects in adaptive immunity. Here, we found that type 3 innate lymphoid cells (ILC3s) are severely diminished in vitamin A-deficient settings, which results in comp...