After a B12 injection...

[chrisxx]

Hi, I wonder if you guys can help shed some light.... I have searched the Internet high and low for answers to my questions but can't find them. I was diagnosed with pernicious anemia about 7 years ago when I was 17... I must admit I didn't really understand nor do anything to help myself. Now I am older I am having the injections every 6 weeks... but when I do have them they make me extremely tired and I usually sleep for about 20 hours and then feel woozy.... this usually passes the next day. I was just wondering if it had the same effect on anybody else and what's the best thing to do for your body to look after it after an injection???

Thanks,

Chris xx

[Lisahelen]

There are probably more informed ' experts' on here but it seems like its just your body reacting to the high imput dose. How do you feel during your doses?

[pvanderaa]

You probably are experiencing "detoxification" symptoms. When the cells in the body get B12, I.e. From an injection, metabolism takes off and floods the blood with byproducts. It takes the liver and organs a couple of days to filter this all out.

You probably need more B12 or more frequent injections to level this off.

Start a logbook and try to measure the severity of the symptoms over 48 hours.

Do you get any similar symptoms within 48 hours of eating any food or drink?

Use your log book as evidence to convince your GP to give you more frequent injections.

Do you also supplement with folic acid? This helps B12 work properly.

[fbirder]

I don't get it that bad, but I do feel knocked-out for around 6 hours after I inject myself. You may find that using a B12 patch (or sublingual spray) of methylcobalamin once a week between injections might level out the peaks and troughs.

[Gambit62 Administrator]

Not something I experience but there have been a few people on here over the last few months who have reported similar symptoms. One reported that moving to 0.5mg doses rather than 1mg doses worked form them so that is something that you might want to try.

Very little is really known about how B12 behaves once it is inside you - bits are known about the mechanism for getting it to the cellular level - transcobalamin - and in particular transcobalamin II. Some people have an autoimmune response when their B12 levels get very high - basically the body tries to shut down the transportation mechanism by creating antibodies to TCII. This leaves you with lots in your blood but none at the cell level.

The rate at which kidneys filter out excess B12 and you excrete it in urine is higher when the levels in your blood are high, meaning that you loose a lot of your B12 in the first 24 hours and it may be that what you are experiencing is that the shot raises your levels to the point at which the autoimmune reaction kicks in. The next day they have fallen below the level at which the autoimmune reaction kicks in so it stops, so effectively for the first 24 hours you have lots of B12 in your serum but none that you cells can use ... which is why lower dose more frequently might be a better option for you.

No guarantee that this is what is really happening but it may be worth giving it a try.