Enough vitamin B6 reduces heart attacks by 70%

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August-Sept, 2004 by Joseph G. Hattersley

Editor:

My 1995 article "Vitamin B6: The Overlooked Key to Preventing Heart Attacks," in the peer reviewed Journal of Applied Nutrition (1) elaborates mechanisms, including inflammation and thrombosis (catastrophic clotting) that are gaining increased recognition as factors in coronary heart disease. This article also integrates the effects of vitamin B6 deficiency with its success in lowering insulin along with Type 2 ("adult onset") diabetes. (2-5) Matthias Rath, MD and double-Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, PhD blame heart attacks on deficient vitamin C and excess Lipoprotein (a). (6,8)

Mainline medicine ignores my paper. Yet in the ensuing eight years no one has refuted any error therein, stated Kilmer S. McCully, MD, in an email, November 2002. Dr. McCully originated the homocysteine explanation of atherosclerosis. My paper partly explains the following results:

1. Over the years 1962-1992, thousands of people in East Texas took 50-300 milligrams of B6 daily under the guidance of John Marion Ellis, MD, of Mt. Pleasant, Texas. He proposed no change in the lives of patients suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome with tenosynovitis, a form of degenerative arthritis (those symptoms, together, accurately warn of high cardiac risk). No need to exercise, stop smoking, modify diet; only "Take vitamin B6." Yet a careful retrospective study covering more than ten years found Dr. Ellis' patients had 73% fewer chest pains and heart attacks than thousands of abstainers in the same area, lived seven to 17 years longer, and felt better. (9,10)

Dr. Ellis' thousands of patients, and tens of thousands referred to cardiologist/internist Moses M. Suzman, MD (see below), treated with B6 from 1950-1990--never complained of over-publicized neurological side effects. A few people may be sensitive to this vitamin as pyridoxine hydrochloride (PnHCl), its common supplemented form, (11) and an excess of this may lower bioavailability. (12) Russell Jaffe, MD, PhD, eliminated such nervous-system side effects among thousands of volunteers by using pharmaceutical grade PnHCl, 200 to 2,000 milligrams daily for up to two years. (13,14) The product is available from VRP 1-800-877-2447; 1-702-884-1300 www.vrp.com, and possibly from others. That firm also supplies pyridoxal-5-phosphate, P5P, the active form of B6 in the body, of which about one-tenth the quantity suffices. (15)

2. Among a sample of women followed for 20 years in the prospective Nurses' Health Study, after adjustment for other risk factors heart attack risk dropped 17% for each two-milligram increase in daily B6 consumption in both diet and supplements. Higher intakes lowered cardiac risk; (16) an increase of eight milligrams would then lower risk by 68%.

3. In the 10-year ARIC (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities) study, the people in the highest quintile of plasma vitamin B6 had 72% fewer heart attacks than those in the lowest quintile of plasma B6. As in Dr. Ellis' experience, for non-cardiac patients nothing but B6 made any difference in cardiac risk--not even the now-famous homocysteine. (17) Moses M. Suzman, MD, of Johannesburg, South Africa, earlier confirmed that finding over a period of 40 years (18,19) but did not publish the results.

A bit of background. In 1949, pathologists James F. Rinehart and Louis D. Greenberg in San Francisco fed young, mostly herbivorous rhesus monkeys synthetic high-protein Western-style diets deficient in single vitamins. After six months to four years, each monkey given a diet somewhat lacking in vitamin B6--but critically, not devoid of it (20,21)--had fibrous and fibrocalcific arterial plaques similar to those seen in most human autopsies. Monkeys given extra B6 showed no arterial damage. (22) Suzman had already suspected a "pandemic" deficiency of B6 in Western cultures as the prime cause of heart attacks, and supplements of it as the key to avoiding and curing heart disease.

So, after those tests with B6-deficient monkeys, he advised all the non-cardiac patients referred to him to take 100 milligrams daily for the rest of their lives. Over 44 years, these tens of thousands had "far fewer cardiac problems than would have been expected"; and they enjoyed improved general health as well. (23,24) Dr. Suzman declared he could not recall a patient of his who had a coronary spasm or cardiac arrest, or even a stroke among stressed hypertensives. Heart patients ingested 200 milligrams of B6 daily, half in a B-complex, other supplements and a semivegetarian diet. They used a heart drug for a few weeks to a few months.

The Codex-supported RDA of vitamin B6 is only about two milligrams! How many millions will suffer and die of preventable heart attacks if that Codex limitation is enforced?

The best food sources of vitamin B6 include bananas and raw calfliver. Two daily 50-milligram tablets are more practical than choking down 196 bananas, or 18.6 pounds of raw calf liver; or 120 cups of brown rice or 2,000 tomatoes every day. (25)

The evidence for vitamin B6's critical role perfectly matches the requirements for proof of causation published by Sir Richard Doll. (Doll, Sir Richard. Proof of causality. Deduction from epidemiological observation. Perspectives Biol Med 2002; 45; 4: 499-515). (26) From 1950 to 1965 while numbers of heart attacks ballooned, arterial damage did not increase; only clotting and inflammation increased. (Thomas W et al. Incidence of myocardial infarction correlated with venous and pulmonary thrombosis and embolism. Amer Jour Cardiology; 1960:41-47). (27) (Nieper, Hans, MD. Mineral transporters, New Dynamics of Preventive Medicine, 1974). (28) Both of these accompany every infection. (29) Stress, smoking, alcohol, caffeine--all promote clotting; enough B6 resists clot formation. (30)