The Vitamins: Their Role in Medical Practice

Description

This book has been designed, as its title implies, as a practical book for medical practitioners, although it should be of interest to medical students and nutritionists. It attempts to provide essential information about this important group of substances rather than be an all embracing monograph on the subject. For this reason biochemical and physiological considera­ tions have been kept to a minimum, and aspects of animal disorders and animal husbandry have not been considered. The material is often presented in a rather dogmatic fashion and, with rare exceptions, references are not included since this makes reading more difficult. The exceptions, where references are provided, are the therapeutic claims, and the series of recent studies which have indicated that vitamin deficiencies are still widely present among certain groups of the population of many industrially developed countries. To add to this reference list there is a reading list which has been selected to give key books, reviews with extensive bibliography and important articles over the past 10 years. From this reading list it is possible to trace most of the literature on the vitamins since they were first described over half a century ago. Front Matter....Pages i-vii Introduction....Pages 1-8 Front Matter....Pages 9-9 Vitamin needs....Pages 11-16 Standard recommendations for vitamin intake....Pages 17-19 The concept of optimum vitamin nutrition....Pages 21-22 Overall causes of vitamin deficiencies....Pages 23-24 Vitamin disorders in the Third World....Pages 25-27 Vitamin disorders in industrially developed countries....Pages 29-34 Clinical manifestations of vitamin deficiencies....Pages 35-35 Assessment of vitamin status....Pages 37-43 Therapeutic uses of the vitamins....Pages 45-53 Vitamin safety....Pages 55-57 Front Matter....Pages 59-59 Risk groups and evidence of dietary vitamin inadequacy....Pages 61-75 Marginal deficiencies....Pages 77-79 Clinical diagnosis of vitamin deficiencies....Pages 81-88 Laboratory confirmation of vitamin deficiencies....Pages 89-93 Therapeutic index....Pages 95-103 Interactions between drugs and vitamins....Pages 105-107 Front Matter....Pages 109-109 Vitamin A....Pages 111-122 Vitamin D....Pages 123-131 Vitamin E....Pages 133-137 Front Matter....Pages 109-109 Vitamin K....Pages 139-142 Vitamin B 1 ....Pages 143-148 Vitamin B 2 ....Pages 149-153 Vitamin B 6 ....Pages 155-158 Niacin....Pages 159-163 Vitamin B 12 ....Pages 165-169 Folic acid....Pages 171-175 Pantothenic acid....Pages 177-179 Biotin....Pages 181-183 Vitamin C....Pages 185-193 Back Matter....Pages 195-216