Biotin, mitochondria, and dementia: Research reveals a connection (Biotin reverses aspects of Alzheimer’s/dementia)

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ^ | January 7, 2021 | John Hewitt / Kelly M. Lohr, Bess Frost, Clemens Scherzer, and Mel B.

[ConservativeMind]

Biotin is also known as vitamin H, named for the German words "Haar" and "Haut," which mean hair and skin. This was due to the fact that even slight deficiencies cause hair thinning, skin rash or brittle fingernails. New research, just published in PNAS, now shows that some forms of severe neurodegeneration, like the frontotemporal dementia seen in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, can directly result from lack of sufficient biotin.

The authors discovered this by looking at fruit flies with dementia. Now, before anyone chuckles, fruit flies actually make a nice model of Alzheimer's or other diseases when they are given the right genes. Human versions of defective MAPT (tau) genes cause these flies to develop tauopathies that resemble those that occur in our own brains. To delve deeper into the neurotoxicity of tau, they looked at over 7,000 fly genes in a forward genetic screen before zeroing in on one significantly modified toxicity of the tauR406W mutant. This gene, Btnd, encodes the biotinidase enzyme that extracts biotin from food sources or recycles it from used enzymes.

Biotin comes to us in the form of biocytin, which is simply a biotin linked to a lysine. Btnd cleaves off the biotin from biocytin, or from its attachment to lysine in carboxylases. When Btnd was also crippled in the flies, their dementia got worse. Furthermore, their mitochondria also became deformed and elongated. The researchers were able to remedy all of these effects by simply giving supplementary biotin, suggesting that some humans with dementia could similarly benefit.

[DannyTN]

And you will want to avoid x-rays unless you want your eye color to change.