B Vitamins: Your Brain’s Natural Repair Kit

Daily wear and tear on the nervous system is normal, but B vitamins play an important role in maintenance and regeneration.

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A patient—let’s call her Jane—presents with a startling problem: Despite once being a functioning member of society, her life has been upended. She’s now unable to form new memories, becomes easily confused, and even struggles to walk steadily.

Following her husband’s death, our patient has struggled with alcohol addiction for five years, which has led to her developing what’s known as Korsakoff’s syndrome. In this lamentable condition, vitamin B1 (thiamine) deficiency leads to the slow degeneration of proper brain function. One may retain a past, but without the essential nutrients to ensure coordination of the nervous system, the future becomes bleaker.

Why B Vitamins Are Important

While many of us, thankfully, may not face such a severe predicament as Jane, daily and environmental stressors do exert a certain degree of wear and tear on the body’s nervous system. At a molecular level, the body is in a continual renovation process to counteract and balance these taxing effects. Metabolic processes relying on B vitamins are vital to these upkeep processes.