A Breath of Fresh Air for Detecting Vitamin B12 Deficiency

Researchers have developed a new test to detect the levels of vitamin B12 using your breath, allowing for a cheaper, faster, and simpler diagnosis that could help to avoid the potentially fatal symptoms of B12 deficiency.

The researchers, from the University of Florida at Gainesville and Metabolic Solutions, Inc. of Nashua, NH, acknowledged that vitamin B12 plays a crucial role in the breakdown of a common preservative in bakery products, called sodium propionate, into carbon dioxide.

As such, the researchers deemed it possible to administer propionate to subjects, which would be broken down with the aid of vitamin B12 in the body, and then measure the resultant carbon dioxide.

In order to differentiate this carbon dioxide from the normal amounts that we breathe out, the researchers labelled the administered propionate with a stable isotope of carbon, which would then be exhaled in the breath as labelled carbon dioxide.

For more:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110622224451.htm