by Gwynn Alcorn

Created on: September 02, 2010

“Niacin to the Rescue”

Niacin may be the answer to reverse memory loss, alleviate schizophrenia, and depression and prevent the mental effects of ageing such as Alzheimer's Disease.

So said Dr. Abram Hoffer, 82-year-old psychiatrist and biochemist, at the recent conference of the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Hoffer says that the old paradigm in psychiatry, particularly in the field of nutrition, only uses vitamins as prevention, based on the theory that vitamins are only needed for deficiency diseases like scurvy or pellagra or beriberi, and even then in only very tiny amounts.

The new paradigm started in 1955 when Dr. Hoffer and two of his colleagues published their first paper showing that Niacin (Vitamin B-3) lowered cholesterol levels.

Drugs are usually the only treatment used for mental illness in the accepted North American medical practice, whereas good nutrition and and vitamins, particularly Niacin, may improve impaired mental states, although once a person has Alzheimer's Disease, Niacin cannot reverse that.  But taking 500 mg to 3,000 mg daily, which Dr. Hoffer himself does, will prevent Alzheimer's from ever occurring as long as good nutrition is also practiced.

Dr. Hoffer, an orthomolecular doctor, was a good friend and colleague of Linus Pauling, American Nobel Chemistry Prize winner in 1954 and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1962, the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes.

In the late 1950s, Pauling worked on the role of enzymes in brain function, believing that mental illness may be partly caused by enzyme dysfunction. In 1965 Pauling read “Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry” by Abram Hoffer, and theorized vitamins might have important biochemical effects unrelated to their prevention of associated deficiency diseases. In 1968 Pauling published a brief paper in “Science” entitled "Orthomolecular Psychiatry" giving name and principle to the popular but controversial therapy movement of the 1970s. Pauling coined the term "orthomolecular" to refer to the practice of varying the concentration of substances normally present in the body to prevent and treat disease. His ideas formed the basis of medicine, which is not generally practised by conventional medical professionals in North America and has been strongly criticized.

Despite strong criticism for his beliefs about the benefits of vitamins, Linus Pauling lived to be a very healthy 93, still riding

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