Relationship between B12 and folate levels to hearing impairment

[WiscGuy]

An interesting article relating hearing impairment to B12 and folate levels:

academic.oup.com/ajcn/artic...

An abstract on a similar topic:

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10....

[Bellabab]

Thanks - very useful links. I collect my first hearing aid at the end of the month. £2,000+ for top quality aid and could probably have been avoided had treatment for PA not been messed up.

[Cherylclaire Forum Support]

B12 deficiency truly is the gift that keeps on giving .

After recently discovering that it can give you yellow-blue blindness, this comes as no surprise.

Just when you thought you had heard it all ...... (or maybe not - ? )

I'm doing the clivealive thing again - becoming a bit of a habit ! Is that also a symptom, I'm wondering ?

[Dragonfly1962]

thank you, I have very poor hearing but never thought it could be associated with my b12 deficiency , I also have had folate deficiency. Nice to know when work colleagues take the mickey out of me that this could be the reason 😏

[Lincsangel1]

Before reading this thread I was looking into the causes of tinnitus.. mine seems to be getting worse even though I am injecting daily.. I came across this article...ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

[WiscGuy in reply to Lincsangel1]

Very interesting. Thanks for posting. I have had tinnitus since at least the early 1990s, and I feel it has diminished in the year and a half that I have been injecting Cyanocobalamin (US).

[Technoid]

Yep, Tinnitus is one of the general symptoms listed on

b12-institute.nl/en/symptom...

With the ears being such a sensitive instrument I would well imagine that low B12 can endanger hearing, such as by the homocysteine connection mentioned in first paper shared by WiscGuy. I'm now at at the point where if someone was to says: "X couldn't be connected to B12 deficiency" then I would be automatically skeptical as it supports so many critical functions in one way or another 🤔

[WiscGuy in reply to Technoid]

I think your skepticism is warranted. Loss of sense of smell (now improving), obstructed pulmonary disease, retina damage, phlebitis, and of course balance are all diagnoses I have received for which searches of the medical databases have revealed links to B12 deficiency. There are others, but I can't think of them now (also a symptom of B12 deficiency, as I understand it).

[Cobalt1312]

Hello everyone, I was wondering, since we're on the topic of B12 and hearing, if any of you struggle with or have information about the relationship between vestibular issues and vertigo related to pernicious anemia?

Sorry, I know it's a little off topic, but hearing and vestibular function are fairly closely linked, right? I have trouble with both...

[Technoid in reply to Cobalt1312]

Many report it. Have had bad vertigo for days, dizziness, never had it conclusively linked to B12 but those symptoms only started during deficiency period.

[Cobalt1312 in reply to Technoid]

Technoid thanks for your response and I'm sorry you've struggled with vertigo too. Does it come and go, or was it something that you experienced for a period of time and then it went away?

My issues with dizziness seem to intensify when I'm pushing myself neurologically, fatigued, or fearful - recently I started doing 40-60 minutes of meditation/visualization a day and after 2-3 weeks by body told me clearly "Too much". I got vertigo getting out of bed like I haven't had in months. If I keep pushing past smaller bouts of dizziness, it seems like I pay for it with more intense and prolonged episodes and sometimes I get flu-like symptoms and nausea.

[WiscGuy in reply to Cobalt1312]

Balance is in part related to B12 deficiency through proprioception. Definition of proprioception from Wikipedia:

[Start quote]

Proprioception, also referred to as kinaesthesia, is the sense of self-movement, force, and body position. It is sometimes described as the "sixth sense". Proprioception is mediated by proprioceptors, mechanosensory neurons located within muscles, tendons, and joints.

[End quote]

B12 deficiency with neural symptoms causes demyelination of nerves. If that happens to the neural components listed above, they can no longer send location data to the central nervous system. I am not medically trained, and I welcome correction, but my impression is that these nerve signals go to the dorsal (rear) panel of the spinal cord, and the responses from the central nervous system, which instruct the body how to move in order to, say, remain upright, are sent from the lateral (side) panels of the spinal column. Over time, B12 deficiency can cause damage to these panels of the spinal column (called Subacute Combined Spinal Cord Degeneration), so that the spinal column can no longer receive or send signals related to proprioception. When this happens, for example, the body body can remain upright using visual information, but that method is crude compared to the system using the spinal column. A person with combined cord degeneration can, for example, balance on one leg with eyes open, but closing the eyes results in loss of balance.

[Cobalt1312 in reply to WiscGuy]

WiscGuy, thanks for putting all that information together! I appreciate it a lot!

I wonder if you can experience B12 related vertigo without having damage to your spinal cord? I just mean, I wonder if you can experience vestibular issues related to pernicious anemia through another mechanism?

Once or twice I feel like I read a post talking about how B12 deficiency progressively moves through different neurological structures/stages in a person's body, but it was so different from my own experience that it made me wonder where that information came from. I also sometimes wonder if traumatic injuries can sort of speed up the neurological issues some one with B12 deficiency experiences. For example, if you get in a car accident and your arm and shoulder gets jammed really badly, can you experience a sort of accelerated demylination or trouble with chronic pain because nerve pain pathways are traumatized?

Just thinking aloud. Thanks again!