News: How Heartburn Pills Destroyed My Life
Ordeal: It took 13 years for Andrea MacArthur to be diagnosed
For 13 long years, Andrea MacArthur struggled to cope with increasing tiredness and apparently random muscle and nerve problems.
By last Christmas, she was crippled with exhaustion.
The muscles in her right leg had stopped working and withered; she’d lost control of her bowel and bladder, and lost her sense of balance, which meant she couldn’t walk far without a cane.
What is extraordinary is that her problems stemmed from the lack of an everyday vitamin, caused by medicine commonly prescribed for ulcers and heartburn – and that Andrea discovered the problem herself by searching on the internet.
Andrea was suffering from pernicious anaemia, because of a deficiency of vitamin B12. This vitamin is essential for producing red blood cells and for maintaining a healthy nervous system, specifically the fatty sheath that protects the nerve cells.
While B12 is available in our diet – from animal products, including milk, meat, fish and eggs, and fortified foods such as breakfast cereals – many people have problems absorbing it.
As a result, the fatty sheath around nerve cells begins to degrade, corrupting the messages being sent to the nerves and ultimately stopping them.
It is caused by an autoimmune condition in which the body starts attacking the cells in the stomach necessary for absorbing B12, explains Professor David Smith, a Bvitamin expert at Oxford University.
Stomach surgery and Crohn’s disease can also damage these cells.
Vitamin B12 deficiency is especially common in older people, because high levels of stomach acid are essential for the body to absorb the vitamin, and as we age our stomachs produce less.
Acid-suppressant drugs given to people with acid reflux and ulcers might be another factor. A recent Austrian study showed that after only four or five months of taking such drugs, vitamin B12 levels began to drop in healthy men.
Last year, GPs wrote more than 32 million prescriptions for acid-suppressant drugs such as omeprazole and lansoprazole.
‘I recommend that anyone who is on these drugs for more than a short period of time take a B12 supplement,’ Professor Smith says.
If you are interested to find out more ways to cure your heartburn naturally without taking any medication, you may like to check this out:
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