Homocysteine may be only a biomarker for diseases

Hyper-homocysteinemia has been associated with a range of nervous diseases including stroke, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Drugs have been developed to lower levels of homocysteine in the blood, but reducing serum homocysteine via vitamin therapy does not result in prevention of vascular disease, meaning that homocysteine may serve as only a biomarker, not a cause for any disease as many  doctors believe.

In a report published in the Jan 2010 issue of Frontiers in bioscience (scholar edition), Ientile R and colleagues from University of Messina in Messina, Italy said that normalization of hyper-homocysteinemia led to improvement in patients with cognitive impairment.

By Jimmy Downs