Are you confused about vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms? Maybe you're wondering which symptoms are important, and which ones are not. Which one should you really be paying attention to as an indicator of whether or not you're still deficient in vitamin B12?
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My name is Dr. Terranella, and in this video we're going to look at the important vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms. We'll go into what those are kind of telling us about the body and the level of deficiency that might be present when you have vitamin B12 deficiency.
There are lots of vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms. What we want to cover and look at in this video are the important vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms, like the most important, the most alarming things to look out for in the symptom profile.
When we think there's B12 deficiency or when we know there's B12 deficiency, the most important vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms are those that indicate a more severe deficiency. For example, those could be neurological symptoms such as numbness and tingling in the feet. Maybe you have a bit of a problem with balance, feeling like you're going to run into a wall or run into things from time to time, poor coordination, etc.
Muscle weakness, memory problems, confusion, and mood disturbances could all be kind of tied in, but these neurological symptoms are an indicator of more severe deficiency and, if they're not taken care of in an appropriate amount of time, can lead to more permanent issues with the nerves.
Another concerning vitamin B12 deficiency symptom, or in this case it's actually a sign, would be macrocytic anemia. When your body actually starts to reduce the amount of red blood cells that it's making because there's not enough B12 around.
This type of anemia is when the red blood cells are going to be larger in size, but there's not going to be a lot of them around.
So this is an indicator of a more persistent B12 deficiency because the body has already started to down-regulate some of the normal functioning of the red blood cells in order to preserve some of that B12 for other functions. Usually when that's going on, there will be some neurological manifestations as well. They could just be mild at this point, but the longer this goes on or the more severe those symptoms start to become, the more concerning it is.
Which leads to the second point about the more important vitamin B12 deficiency symptoms is just more so the severity of them.
So you don't develop numbness and tingling in your feet and hands on day one when you're B12 deficient. Usually that happens over many, many months and even years of gradually going lower and lower on your vitamin B12 levels.
You have to build up the methylmalonic acid in those nerve sheaths. They start to damage the nerves, and that's what ends up causing damage to those nerves and causing all these neurological symptoms.
So the important B12 deficiency symptoms, the way I see it, are neurological in nature, the severity of them. Meaning is it just like one toe or the whole foot? The whole leg numbness and tingling? Are you having that problem with balance and coordination?
Is there evidence of it in your red blood cells? And then how long have those symptoms actually been there? You can contrast that with someone that just might be a little bit tired or fatigued. Well, yeah, that's concerning too, but not as concerning because the longer the B12 deficiency goes on in someone that's really deficient and having neurological symptoms, the more concerning it is because it's reflecting a lower vitamin B12 level.