Vitamin deficiency

Vitamins play an integral and an almost central role in human health and wellbeing. Significantly, the vitamins were discovered not by their presence in the diet but because of their absence.

Deficiency of vitamins may arise due to: inadequate dietary intake, decreased absorption, increased need and impaired unitization.

A lack of most of the vitamins known to be required by human resulted in typical clinical syndromes or symptoms that can be cured by adding the necessary vitamin to the diet.

Deficiency of fat soluble vitamins results in night blindness, skeletal deformation, haemorrhages and hemolysis. Deficiencies of water soluble vitamins produce beriberi, glossitis, pellagra, microcytic anaemia, megaloblastic anemia and scurvy. Since most of the water soluble vitamins are component or enzymes, their deficiency leads to blocks in metabolic reactions.

This negative approach to the function of the vitamins is a useful tool in research. The investigator obtains some clues to the metabolic role of nutrients when he observes the functional failures that result when the nutrient is absent from the diet.
Vitamin deficiency