Increased Levels of Homocysteine in Patients With Crohn's Disease Are Related To Folate Levels

Abstract

Homocysteine levels are increased in patients with Crohn's disease and this finding is inversely correlated with folate levels. Supplementation of folate to patients with Crohn's disease may be warranted.

Hyperhomocysteinemia in ulcerative colitis is related to folate levels

“…We did not find significant correlation between age, disease activity, medication, smoking status, and Hcys levels in this UC cohort. Chowers et al [33] , have observed similar findings in a group of patients with CD.…”

“…Increased Hcys levels and high prevalence of hHcys in IBD patients have been reported in previous studies [31][32][33][34][35][36] . In our study, similar findings were observed in this cohort of UC patients with a slightly higher prevalence of hHcys (30%) than in other studies (10-26%) [31,32,35,36] .…”

“…The suboptimal vitamin status in IBD patients can be due to a combination of several factors. Folate levels may be low due to either inadequate dietary intake, or increased utilization, or drug effects, mainly SASP [33] . In our study, one patient was receiving SASP and had low folate levels and hHcys.…”

“…Deficiencies of key nutrients/cofactors in Hcys metabolism pathways (B 2 , B 6 , B 12 , and folate) might lead to raised Hcys levels in IBD. The association between IBD and hHcys has been shown in some recent studies, reporting an increased prevalence of hHcys in IBD (both UC and CD) [31][32][33][34][35][36] . The aim of this study was to evaluate whether Hcys levels were elevated compared to a group of healthy controls and whether Hcys levels were related to vitamin B 12 Serum Hcys levels were also measured in blood samples from 50 healthy control subjects (HC) with similar age and gender (25 females and 25 males, age 39.96±14.33 years, range 17-72 years), under similar conditions and in the same laboratory.…”

The relationship between folate and docosahexaenoic acid in men

“…In addition, a number of disorders suggested to benefit from treatment with fish oil are associated with low folate or with a marker of low folate status, homocysteine (Jacob et al, 1994). These disorders include Crohn's disease (Belluzzi et al, 1996;Chowers et al, 2000), rheumatoid arthritis (Kremer et al, 1987;Schroecksnadel et al, 2003), mania (Hasanah et al, 1997;Stoll et al, 1999a, b) and hostility (Stoney and Engebretson, 2000;Iribarren et al, 2004). One study suggests that folate, like fish oil, can lower triglycerides, LDL and cholesterol (Connor et al, 1993;McGregor et al, 2000).…”