so this is big very soon we may indeed have a vitamin supplement to help treat and prevent glaucoma which is a major cause of vision loss and blindness worldwide so in today's video we're going to be reviewing that of vitamin B3 specifically nicotinamide and its effects at slowing down preventing and perhaps even treating vision loss from glaucoma will include how it works what the research is showing and some potential side effects that you may want to know about if you ever choose to take a supplement like this that's today's video Let's Take a Look first
what is vitamin B3 vitamin B3 is niin also known as nicotinic acid and your body regularly makes this by breaking down tryptophan an amino acid that is often found in foods like poultry fish dairy products and even some whole grains like oatmeal you can also get nyin in its free form by eating foods like beans and liver but either way biochemically your cells will turn into what is called nicotinamide and then further it'll turn it into nicotinamide adenine diphosphate or NAD plus which plays a huge role within the cell's mitochondria for energy production and is
finding in research to play a major role in metabolism and aging and even cell survival okay so why is vitamin B3 then getting so much attention in terms of glaucoma now if you recall from previous videos glaucoma in short is a condition where the the optic nerve in the back of the eye slowly dies over time eventually leading to kind of a slow loss of someone's side Vision so slowly that most people don't know that it's happening until it's too late where the vision starts to encroach on the center part of your vision and unfortunately
for people it can cause permanent blindness where you can't see anything it's just dark now the problem with treatment for glaucoma is that most treatments whether it be surgical whether it be with lasers or with medication is all focused on reducing the internal pressure within the eye and that goal is really to help reduce the mechanical stress that the pressure can push on the nerve from the inner side and help prevent the nerve from slowly taking that damage now what's cool about the vitamin B3 research is that they're showing that taking supplementation specifically of nicotinamide
may be able to provide almost a metabolic support for the internal cells of the optic nerve and prevent that damage from occurring as well I sort of think of it as an analogy of maybe a dam holding up a large body of water if we had to try to save that Dam from taking damage and collapsing we can either reduce the amount of water that it's holding up or we can add more cement spackle and give more structural support to that Dam again kind of like what we're doing here we can reduce the pressure with
medication or we can add more structural support to the nerve on the other side this really became an interest after a publication in science in 2017 that looked at mice given nicotinamide supplementation and found that those mice had about a 93% reduction in the risk of developing glaucoma and then in 2019 a small cohort of glaucoma patients were evaluated for any possible nutritional deficiencies and they again found a pretty strong association between glaucoma develop M and nicotinamide deficiencies however I will comment on that 2019 study it was a small cohort and they did it through
serum testing which is a little bit controversial and may not be super accurate for measuring nicotinamide in the system now that 2017 study with supplements was done on mice but what about humans well in 2020 they did a human study looking at patients already diagnosed and treated for glaucoma what they did is had them split into two different groups one was done with the placebo the other was given 1/2 G of nicotinamide supplement a day for 6 weeks after the 6 weeks they then upped the regimen to three g a day and then after those
12 weeks they then went and did a crossover design where the placebo and treatment groups switched for that protocol and what they found was that when given the supplement those patients with glaucoma had improved retinal function on electroretinogram and patients also had a slight Improvement in their visual fields which is the side vision test that we use to map out any side vision loss from patients who are suffering from things like glaucoma and then in 2021 a similar study was published where again they took patients who had been treated for glaucoma gave them the exact
same amount of vitamin B3 from the previous study but they also gave them a supplement of pyruvate which is another molecule that has an essential role in cellular metabolism but they found that the patients taking the supplement had a significant Improvement in their visual field sensitivities which is a way of sort of showing that if somebody had visual field loss that around the edges of where they were testing was a lot more obvious and easier to test and map out that field loss which leads researchers to believe that the supplement is indeed adding structural support
to the optic nerve especially the cells that may be already compromised from glaucoma of course these studies were shortterm and again the people in these trials were already diagnosed and being treated for glaucoma at the same time so you may be wondering is there any evidence that getting more vitamin B3 in your system could help prevent glaucoma that's a good question especially for anybody who may have glockoma that runs in their family well in a recent study just published here in August 2024 they looked at mice given both low Doses and high doses of nicotinamide
the Low Dose was equivalent about 2 G per per day for a human equivalent and the higher dose was closer to about 6 G per day but what they found is that for the mice that were given the supplements first either the low dose or the high do that those mice had more protective effect against ocular hypertension or elevated eye pressure that came later where the mice that were given the elevated eye pressure and cause damage to their nerve first from glaucoma that given the supplements later only the high doses of nicotinamide offered any significant
benefit which could indicate that supplementation with vitamin B3 may have an even bigger more important role in protecting the optic nerve before glockoma or any elevated eye pressure ensues but again this was done in mice and of course we do need more standardized human clinical trials before any doctors or the medical community at large is going to feel comfortable prescribing vitamin B3 or nicotinamide to either help treat already existing glaucoma or to help prevent it but thankfully there are some longterm randomized control trials that are underway in locations around the world including Sweden in the
United Kingdom Australia and Singapore and if you're watching this and you're thinking hey I would love to get involved in a clinical trial I will put links to some of those trials in the description below so you can check it out now I do think it's really important to talk about safety and potential side effects right taking more of a a good thing doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work better and people who've had history of taking vitamin B3 supplementation have had reported Adverse Events namely that of flushing of the skin and GI upset and
although rare it has also been reported to lead to problems with low blood pressure as well as insulin resistance and even macular edema which is a swelling of the retina in the back of the eye and again at high doses taken for a long period of time it has also been linked to problems with liver function again more rare but it is a potential side effect an adverse event so uh good things to know about and talk with your doctor first before taking any supplementation just stepping back here and thinking about how vitamin B3 is
supposed to help with glaucoma by improving mitochondrial function it reminds me a lot of how red light therapy is supposed to help with eye diseases as well which gets me really excited as we've talked about light therapy briefly in some previous videos and I hope to be reporting on some new information on that red light very soon now before we wrap up I do want to give a quick shout out to that of Nano dropper which I think is an excellent option for anybody that takes medicated eye drops for glaucoma the Nano dropper is an
attachment that goes onto an eye dropper bottle and effectively reduces the size of the drop of medication that way you can stretch out the medication and the bottle lasts a lot longer reducing your cost but also reduces any amounts of side effects that come from getting those eye drops hitting you in the eye and the eyelids and it does this without any loss of efficacy of the medication whenever the topic of glaucoma comes up I try to mention Nano dropper in some way because I think it is a really cool invention and I think it
can help a lot of people if you do want to look into it and go to their website you can use Allen 10 at checkout to save 10% that is not an affiliate code that I won't receive any payment directly from you using that code it's simply just a discount code because Nano dropper is awesome and is giving us that discount but hey if you found this video helpful please do me a favor and hit that like button for me and also check out my other videos on natural treatments for glaucoma coming up right here
to the side thanks so much for watching Dr Allen here keep an eye on it and we'll see you in that next video [Music]
