High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
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Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#2This is a tricky one with most cases I could find not actually documenting how much people were taking. With some cases mentioning people taking 500+mg, it's hard to tell how much causes problems. The original threshold was set by basically "we haven't seen issues with under 500mg, so set it to half that - 250mg it is".
Btw, if you take more than 100mg, the serum level will easily go out of range for usual labs. (400+ nmol)
Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#3The title mentions high doses and long periods, but let’s quantify it more accurately:
Cases of toxicity have been reported at doses as low as 21 mg per day, the recommended daily intake is 1.3 to 2 mg. The person in question was diagnosed with issues possibly caused by this after 2 years.
Edit: Clarification, the 21 mg figure isn’t from this article but from a related document released by Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration.
https://consultations.tga.gov.au/medicines-regulation-divisi...
Another news source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/05/simon...
Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#4The title mentions high doses and long periods, but let’s quantify it more accurately: Cases of toxicity have been reported at doses as low as 21 mg per day, the recommended daily intake is 1.3 to 2 mg. The person in question was diagnosed with issues possibly caused by this after 2 years. Edit: Clarification, the 21 mg figure isn’t from this article but from a related document released by Australian Therapeutic Good…
I checked the daily multivitamin I take and it has 40mg of B6.
Edit: read it again and that's based on 2 tablets per day (I take one) so I guess I get 20mg. Might cut it to every other day though.
Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#5The title mentions high doses and long periods, but let’s quantify it more accurately: Cases of toxicity have been reported at doses as low as 21 mg per day, the recommended daily intake is 1.3 to 2 mg. The person in question was diagnosed with issues possibly caused by this after 2 years. Edit: Clarification, the 21 mg figure isn’t from this article but from a related document released by Australian Therapeutic Good…
I checked the daily multivitamin I take and it has 40mg of B6. Edit: read it again and that's based on 2 tablets per day (I take one) so I guess I get 20mg. Might cut it to every other day though.
Mine is 1.05mg... 40mg seems excessive, even accounting for bioavailability.
Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#6As someone taking magnesium, now I suddenly need to check my bottle.
Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#7Looked it up on google and it provided me with this summary above the search:
"Ultra Muscleze® P5P," a product by BioCeuticals, contains 53.7 mg of the active form of vitamin B6 (pyridoxal 5-phosphate monohydrate) per tablet. This equates to 34.2 mg of pyridoxine (vitamin B6).
Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#8The title mentions high doses and long periods, but let’s quantify it more accurately: Cases of toxicity have been reported at doses as low as 21 mg per day, the recommended daily intake is 1.3 to 2 mg. The person in question was diagnosed with issues possibly caused by this after 2 years. Edit: Clarification, the 21 mg figure isn’t from this article but from a related document released by Australian Therapeutic Good…
> Cases of toxicity have been reported at doses as low as 21 mg per day, the recommended daily intake is 1.3 to 2 mg. The person in question was diagnosed with issues possibly caused by this after 2 years.
That's very hard to believe. In my "normal" vitamin B-Complex supplement there is 20mg of B6 in the daily dose. If 21mg per day would cause nerve damage, that we'd know (and it would be an epidemic).
Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#9The article is quite one-sided. My experience is certainly that B6 has an effect on nerves, but in my case that's been a good thing.
I started a software job in 1995, writing a lot of code. By mid-1997, I had severe nerve pain in both wrists, even with ice, stretching, and ibuprofen.
I went to an excellent orthopedist who prescribed two things: a Kinesis Advantage keyboard to mostly immobilize the wrists while typing, and 50 mg of Vitamin B6 per day.
The combination saved my career. I sometimes get out of the habit of taking the B6 for a week or two, out of sheer forgetfulness. After a couple of weeks, I'll start noticing very minor nerve pain if I'm using the Kinesis Advantage keyboard (I'm typing this on one right now.) But if I'm typing on a normal keyboard at a client site, a week or so is enough to bring back noticeable nerve pain, which reminds me to start the B6 regimen again. After a few days on B6, the pain recedes.
I was a little nervous at taking 2500% of the RDA, so I researched the medical literature, and the studies I found showing problems caused by excessive B6 all described people taking 200mg or more per day.
The article notes that "since 2022 the TGA has required a warning label for listed medicines with more than 10mg of B6." So maybe studies showing the potential for harm have come out since then; I don't know. On the other hand, has anyone ever gathered data to show whether supplemental B6 actually does improve cases like mine? Vitamin B6 can't be patented, so there's no money to be made, so who is going to fund that study?
Re: High vitamin B6 doses over a long period could cause irreversible nerve damage
#10As someone taking magnesium, now I suddenly need to check my bottle.
Swisse magnesium in Australia has Magnesium (?Carbonate?) and nothing else. The same formulation in Hong Kong, has B in it.
So, be careful about assuming one economies variant of a pill is the same as another. Same container, same branding.