Optimise Your Homocysteine & Stay Healthy & Full Of Energy

Have you ever wondered how your brain and body chemistry stays in balance? You eat 10 tons of food in your lifetime, and this somehow turns into YOU - a salty soup of chemicals all connected together. Think about when a fire alarm goes off; amazingly you are able to make more adrenaline and take flight in just 0.2 of a second; how does the body react so quickly and keep everything in balance? Well this is where "methylation" is important. Methyl groups, that are made from one carbon atom and three hydrogen atoms, are added and subtracted from other molecules in your body in order to make the substances it needs.

YOUR ability to "methylate" is therefore vital to your health and wellbeing. The marker homocysteine is a naturally occurring amino acid that is found in raised levels in blood plasma when your ability to methylate is out of balance. It is near the beginning of the reaction chain where methylation is concerned: Think of a long chain of people in a row with a continuous supply of balls being passed along the chain. If one of the people stops passing, then the balls build up at that point and the reaction chain stops. Well it's the same with homocysteine. If your body doesn't have the necessary vitamins and minerals to keep the reaction chain going then the reaction stops and homocysteine levels just get higher and higher; just like the pile of balls (so to speak!).

The importance of homocysteine as a marker for health and wellbeing is only now becoming clear and the importance of homocysteine as a risk factor is becoming more widely accepted. There are an increasing number of studies that show that homocysteine to be a predictor of potential health problems. Raised blood plasma homocysteine concentrations can both predict and precede the development of cardiovascular disease including stroke.

A study published last year, in the British Medical Journal, showed that homocysteine levels in blood plasma predicts risk of death from cardiovascular disease in older people even better than any conventional measure of risk including cholesterol, blood pressure or smoking. Women with high homocysteine levels find it harder to conceive and are at risk from repeated early miscarriage. Raised levels of homocysteine have also been linked to Alzheimer's disease, dementia, declining memory, poor concentration and judgement and lowered mood. Recent research from Oxford University has shown that large doses of vitamin B could halve the rate of brain shrinkage associated with memory loss and dementia in the elderly, and, in the study, it was the elderly people with higher levels of homocysteine that had greater brain shrinkage.

The way that the blood sample is collected for homocysteine measurement is critical because after the blood sample is taken the homocysteine is released from the red blood cells into the blood plasma which can give a false result. YorkTest Laboratories have overcome this problem by developing a unique patented finger-prick blood collection device that enables the immediate separation of the blood plasma from the red blood cells. The blood plasma is collected into an absorbent pad that is posted back to their laboratory for testing.

The good news is that raised homocysteine levels can usually be brought back to normal levels by simple dietary changes and / or supplementation with B vitamins. However, everyone is unique and differing metabolic, environmental and particularly genetic factors make it virtually impossible to determine an individuals' nutritional requirements without assessing levels of homocysteine first, and then monitoring dietary changes to ensure that acceptable homocysteine levels are reached. There really is one indicator that can determine better than any other whether you will live a long and healthy life; by optimising your homocysteine level you can take the first step to reducing your risks of ill health into old age. What could be more important than that?