Favorite medicines or med research: benfotiamine for diabetes
(Both for work and for fun I spend plenty of time reading medical research.)
If you have diabetes or know someone with it, especially but not limited to if neuropathy is occuring, you should consider benfotiamine (also spelled benfothiamine). By "consider" I mean you should read the research and then go buy it for any relatives or friends who can't buy it for themselves.
You can look it up on PubMed.
I suggest reading about it on Pubmed or medical journal index of choice before looking on Google. This isn't just another supplement with interesting anecdotal stories as a Google search alone might suggest (given all the shopping sites with repetitive hype-sounding claims).
You'll find articles from (mostly European but increasingly North American*) medical journals with titles like:
"Benfotiamine accelerates the healing of ischaemic diabetic limbs in mice..." and
"Benfotiamine in the treatment of diabetic polyneuropathy--a three-week randomized, controlled pilot study" and
"Benfotiamine blocks three major pathways of hyperglycemic damage and prevents experimental diabetic retinopathy." (Nature Medicine)
Two results stand out:
1. it helps reduce, relieve and reverse symptoms of neuropathy. It also help with other side-effects of diabetes such as retinal lesions, 'cerebral oxidative damage', and more.
2. studies have shown why it helps. The most studied reason is that it helps stop glucose toxicity- certain sugar oxidation pathways that results in sugar-protein crosslinks (analogous to rust or caramelization). See "The role of AGEs and AGE inhibitors in diabetic cardiovascular disease."
Benfotiamine is a fat-soluble type of vitamin B1: because of this, there can be resistance from doctors, as it isn't stocked in North American pharmacies.** You'll have to buy it online, most likely. It's a common and expected treatment in Europe, and there's at least one Canadian company making it.***
-------
* Mostly European journals for the first decade of research on it, so North American doctors aren't as familiar with it. However, articles published in journals like Nature Medicine have helped. It started getting more N.A. press only about 4-5 years ago.
** I know from personal experience, in trying to get it for a close relative when he was in a nursing home. It was like trying to get them to prescribe, say, fish oil supplements.**** There isn't a (mental or bureaucratic) mechanism for prescribing supplements, even when the 'supplement' is a full-fledged medicine elsewhere.
*** Marketing it as a health supplement, as they must. In random web searches you'll often see it marketed for anti-aging: don't let that turn you off from it as a neuropathy treatment.
**** Not that there's anything wrong with Fish Oil- studies show it to be useful, especially for heart attack victims: it is prescribed in EU countries for that.
If you have diabetes or know someone with it, especially but not limited to if neuropathy is occuring, you should consider benfotiamine (also spelled benfothiamine). By "consider" I mean you should read the research and then go buy it for any relatives or friends who can't buy it for themselves.
You can look it up on PubMed.
I suggest reading about it on Pubmed or medical journal index of choice before looking on Google. This isn't just another supplement with interesting anecdotal stories as a Google search alone might suggest (given all the shopping sites with repetitive hype-sounding claims).
You'll find articles from (mostly European but increasingly North American*) medical journals with titles like:
"Benfotiamine accelerates the healing of ischaemic diabetic limbs in mice..." and
"Benfotiamine in the treatment of diabetic polyneuropathy--a three-week randomized, controlled pilot study" and
"Benfotiamine blocks three major pathways of hyperglycemic damage and prevents experimental diabetic retinopathy." (Nature Medicine)
Two results stand out:
1. it helps reduce, relieve and reverse symptoms of neuropathy. It also help with other side-effects of diabetes such as retinal lesions, 'cerebral oxidative damage', and more.
2. studies have shown why it helps. The most studied reason is that it helps stop glucose toxicity- certain sugar oxidation pathways that results in sugar-protein crosslinks (analogous to rust or caramelization). See "The role of AGEs and AGE inhibitors in diabetic cardiovascular disease."
Benfotiamine is a fat-soluble type of vitamin B1: because of this, there can be resistance from doctors, as it isn't stocked in North American pharmacies.** You'll have to buy it online, most likely. It's a common and expected treatment in Europe, and there's at least one Canadian company making it.***
-------
* Mostly European journals for the first decade of research on it, so North American doctors aren't as familiar with it. However, articles published in journals like Nature Medicine have helped. It started getting more N.A. press only about 4-5 years ago.
** I know from personal experience, in trying to get it for a close relative when he was in a nursing home. It was like trying to get them to prescribe, say, fish oil supplements.**** There isn't a (mental or bureaucratic) mechanism for prescribing supplements, even when the 'supplement' is a full-fledged medicine elsewhere.
*** Marketing it as a health supplement, as they must. In random web searches you'll often see it marketed for anti-aging: don't let that turn you off from it as a neuropathy treatment.
**** Not that there's anything wrong with Fish Oil- studies show it to be useful, especially for heart attack victims: it is prescribed in EU countries for that.