Each capsule contains:

Benefits and uses of Vitamin B6 include

Are there any nutrients that might help Pyridoxal 5’ Phosphate work more effectively?
B-complex and magnesium increase the effectiveness of Pyridoxal 5’Phosphate.

Diabetes Protection
A test for glycosylated hemoglobin will show how long someone's body has been exposed to the tissue-damaging effect of high blood sugar. Higher readings of this blood marker correspond to a greater extent of diabetes-related cellular harm. Vitamin B6 reduces glycosylated hemoglobin, which suggests that the disease's cell damage decreases, too. Taking supplements helps stabilize blood sugar, encourages cells to metabolize blood glucose, and fights eye damage and vision loss from diabetic retinopathy. Regular use also lowers the level of xanthurenic acid, an injurious chemical by-product of a B6 deficiency that causes diabetes in lab animals.³

Heart Disease
Diabetes drastically raises the risk of heart disease and since B-6 improves blood sugar control, it is able to protect cardiovascular health. B-6 is one of the three B-complex nutrients (along with folic acid and vitamin B12) which reduces homocysteine, one of the most recognized heart risk factor whose elevated level in the blood corresponds to greater rates of strokes and heart attacks. A lack of vitamin B-6 also increases heart attack risk since without it, blood thickens and tends to clot and block off an artery. Vitamin B6 also acts as a diuretic, helping to reduce water retention and, as a result, lower high blood pressure. A Harvard study of fifteen thousand American physicians illustrated that the men with the lowest B6 levels had 50% more heart attacks than their better-nourished peers.³

Immune System Weakness
As we age, vitamin B6 is important in having a strong natural defense from viral and bacterial infections. A lack of vitamin B6 diminishes our number of T cells. People with AIDS need the nutrient in an amount far beyond what they could possibly obtain from food. Even when they eat what a conventional dietitian would consider an adequate amount, AIDS patients still have significant B6 deficiency.³

Hormone Disturbances
Women have a special need for vitamin B6, because it performs a vital role in maintaining a balance of female hormones and helping PMS. By helping to convert estradiol, a form of estrogen, into estriol, its least harmful and least carcinogenic form, B6 counteracts one cause of cancer in women. As a natural diuretic, the vitamin brings relief when premenstrual tension starts to flare.³

Pregnancy Related Problems
A woman requires more B6 when she is pregnant and when she is taking birth control pills. Both tend to deplete the body of pyridoxine. Restoring optimal levels of B-6 often alleviates the depression that sets in as a side effect of oral contraceptives.³ Pregnancy related nausea and vomiting are also greatly alleviated with vitamin B-6.

Vitamin B6 (and Magnesium) in the Treatment of Autism
Autism Research Review International. 1987 Vol. 1, No.4, p.3. Bernard Rimland, Ph.D.
All 12 studies known to me in which vitamin B6 has been evaluated as a treatment for autistic children have provided positive results. This is a rather remarkable record, since the many drugs that have been evaluated as treatments for autism have produced very inconsistent results. If a drug shows positive results in about half of the evaluation studies, it is considered a success and the drug is then advocated for use with autistic patients. However, despite the remarkably consistent findings in the research on the use of vitamin B6 in the treatment of autism, and despite its being immeasurably safer than any of the drugs used for autistic children, there are at present very few practitioners who use it or advocate its use in the treatment of autism.

Research on the use of vitamin B6 with autistic children began in the 1960s. In 1966 two British neurologists, A. F. Heeley and G. E. Roberts, reported that 11 of 19 autistic children excreted abnormal metabolites in their urine when given a tryptophan load test. Giving these children a single 30 mg. tablet of vitamin B6 normalized their urine; however, no behavioral studies were done. A German investigator, V ' E. Bonisch, reported in 1968 that 12 of 16 autistic children had shown considerable behavioral improvement when given high dosage levels (100 mg. to 600 mg. per day) of vitamin B6. Three of Bonisch's patients spoke for the first time after the vitamin B6 was administered in this open clinical trial.

After my book Infantile Autism was published in 1964, 1 began receiving hundreds of letters from parents of autistic children throughout the United States, including a number who had tried the then new idea of "megavitamin therapy' on their autistic children. Most had begun experimenting with various vitamins on their autistic children as a result of reading books by popular nutrition writers. I initially was quite skeptical about the remarkable improvement being reported by some of these parents, but as the evidence accumulated, my interest was aroused. A questionnaire sent to the 1,000 parents then on my mailing list revealed that 57 had experimented with large doses of vitamins. Many of these had seen positive results in their children. As a result, I undertook a large-scale study, on over 200 autistic children, of megadose quantities of vitamin B6, niacinamide, pantothenic acid, and vitamin C, along with a multiple vitamin tablet especially designed for the study. The children were living with their parents throughout the U.S. and Canada, and each was medically supervised by the family’s own physician. (Over 600 parents had volunteered for the study, but most could not overcome their physicians' skepticism.)

At the end of the four-month trial it was clear that vitamin B6 was the most important of the four vitamins we had investigated, and that in some cases it brought about remarkable improvement. Between 30% and 40% of the children showed significant improvement when the vitamin B6 was given to them. A few of the children showed minor side effects (irritability, sound sensitivity and bed-wetting), but these quickly cleared up when additional magnesium was supplied.

Two years later two colleagues and I initiated a second experimental study of the use of megavitamin therapy on autistic children, this time concentrating on vitamin B6 and magnesium. My co-investigators were Professors Enoch Callaway of the University of California Medical Center at San Francisco and Pieffe Dreyfus of the University of California Medical Center at Davis. The double-blind placebo-controlled crossover experiment utilized 16 autistic children, and again produced statistically significant results. For most children dosage levels of B6 ranged between 300 mg. and 500 mg. per day. Several hundred mg./day of magnesium and a multiple-B tablet were also given, to guard against B6.induced deficiencies of these other nutrients. (In all probability, the temporary numbness and tingling resulting from B6 megadoses, reported recently by Schaumburg et al., were the result of induced deficiencies of other nutrients caused by taking B6 alone in enormous amounts - a foolish thing to do.)

In both studies the children showed a remarkably wide range of benefits from the vitamin B6. There was better eye contact, less self-stimulatory behavior, more interest in the world around them, fewer tantrums, more speech, and in general the children became more normal, although they were not completely cured.

People vary enormously in their need for B6. The children who showed improvement under B6 improved because they needed extra B6. Autism is thus in many cases a vitamin B6 dependency syndrome.

After completing his participation in our study, Professor Callaway visited France, where he persuaded Professor Gilbert LeLord and his colleagues to undertake additional B6/magnesium research on autistic children. The French researchers, although skeptical that anything as innocuous as a vitamin could influence a disorder as profound as autism, became believers after their first, reluctantly undertaken, experiment on 44 hospitalized children. They have since published six studies evaluating the use of vitamin B6. with and without additional magnesium, on autistic children and adults. Their studies typically used as much as a gram a day of vitamin B6 and half a gram of magnesium.

LeLord and his colleagues measured not only the behavior of the autistic children, but also their excretion of homovanihic acid (HVA) and other metabolites in the urine. Additionally, they have done several studies in which the effects of the vitamin B6 and/or the magnesium on the brain electrical activity of the patients was analyzed. All of these studies have produced positive results.

LeLord et al. recently summarized their results on 91 patients: 14% improved markedly, 33% improved, 42% showed no improvement, and 11% worsened. They noted that "in all our studies, no side effects were observed… Presumably, no physical side effects were seen.

Several recent studies by two groups of U.S. investigators, Thomas Gualtieri et al., at the University of North Carolina, and George Ellman et al., at Sonoma State Hospital in California, have also shown positive results on autistic patients.

While no patient has been cured with the vitamin B6 and magnesium treatment, there have been many instances where remarkable improvement has been achieved. In one such case an 18-year-old autistic patient was about to be evicted from the third mental hospital in his city. Even massive amounts of drugs had no effect on him, and he was considered too violent and assaultative to be kept in the hospital. The psychiatrist tried the B6/magnesium approach as a last resort. The young man calmed down very quickly. The psychiatrist reported at a meeting that she had recently visited the family and had found the young man to now be a pleasant and easy-going young autistic person who sang and played his guitar for her.

Another example: a frantic mother phoned me to ask for information on sheltered workshops in her city, since her 25year-old autistic son was about to be expelled for unmanageable behavior. I knew of no alternate placements for the son, but I suggested that the mother try a supplement containing B6, magnesium and other nutrients. Within a few weeks she called again to tell me excitedly that her son was doing very well now and his piecework pay had risen dramatically from the minimum pay of $1.50 per week to $25 per week.

In view of the consistent findings showing the safety and efficacy of the nutrients B6 and magnesium in treating autistic individuals, and in view of the inevitability of short and/or long-term side effects of drug use, it certainly seems that this safe and rational approach should be tried before drugs are employed. (See publication fist, item 39; also, see related articles on pages and 4.)¹⁸

Vaccinations: The Overlooked Factors
Autism Research Review International. Vol. 12, No. 1, 1998. Bernard Rimland, Ph.D.

Vaccinations, like motherhood and apple pie, have long been regarded as taboo topics, beyond criticism. No more. The publication in The Lancet of the article by Andrew Wakefield and associates, providing a well-documented mechanism for the long suspected role of MMR vaccines in causing autism, has raised an international furor.

I began to suspect a link between the DPT vaccination and autism as early as in the mid1960s, based on letters from and interviews with many parents. Our Form E-3 parent questionnaire, dating from 1967, asked parents about their children's reaction to the DPT shot. H. L. Coulter and B. L. Fisher state, in their excellent book, DPT.- Shot in the Dark(l 985), "The Phenomenon of early infantile autism was first observed and discussed by physicians in the early 1940s, a few years after the pertussis vaccine became more widely used in the United States ........The parallel to certain areas of pertussis vaccine damage is striking" (p. 123).

Readers of the ARRI are well aware of the autism-vaccine controversy (see ARRI 10/4, 10/1, 9/3,9/2,9/1,6/3), but until now the mass media have been kept largely in the dark. In Britain, where there has been an epidemic of autism, with hundreds of families registering for projected class-action law suits, some newspapers have been devoting half-page or larger articles to the controversy.

Dr. Wakefield and Ws courageous collaborators have endured a torrent of criticism and abuse from those dedicated to silencing anyone challenging the sacred-cow status of vaccines. The fact is, vaccines are not nearly as safe, nor anywhere near as effective, as vaccination proponents claim.

Wakefield's opponents argue, quite speciously, that he is confusing association with causation, and that the autism link may be merely "coincidental."

I find it doubly ironic that the vaccine advocates accuse Wakefield of this elementary error in logic. That very argument was used just as wrongly- against vaccinations-by the opponents of Edward Jenner when he introduced vaccination to Europe. (It was used earlier in Asia.) Jenner's observation that milkmaids exposed to pox-infected cows developed a resistance to smallpox was attributed to coincidence. Fortunately for today's vaccine proponents, Jenner's critics did not succeed in dismissing his observations as merely "coincidence."

The second irony is that the critics who accuse Dr. Wakefield of confusing association with causation are guilty of doing that very thing-deliberately, not mistakenly while trying to influence public policy, by claiming that vaccines cause steep declines in the incidence of disease when there is good.

In their reply to Wakefield's article, "Vaccine adverse effects: causal or coincidental?," R.T. Chen and F. DeStephano (Lancet2/28/98) present a table implying that the incidence of a number of diseases was enormously reduced by vaccinations. In fact, judging from data presented by Neil Z. Miller in his book Vaccines, are They Safe and Effective 4 The reductions Chen and DeStephano cite are often coincidental rather than causal. In the case of measles, the death rate did drop precipitously over a period of four decades, but the death rate fell 95% before the measles vaccine was introduced! In the case of polio, the death rate had dropped 60% from its peak in the 1920s and '30s before the vaccines arrived in the 1950s. There is considerable evidence that the claims of benefit for other vaccines (e.g., pertussis, tetanus) are also greatly inflated.

There is an enormous amount of credible evidence that vaccines can and do cause harm. In response to what was seen as a cause-and-effect relationship with sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), the Japanese government, in 1979, ordered the postponement of routine DPT shots until after the age of two. "SIDS has virtually disappeared from Japan" (Neil Z. Miller, In2mu&zadon, Theory vs. Reality (I 996).) In an article titled, "The Dark Side of Immunizations?," Science News (November 22, 1997) reported findings by scientists implicating the rise in diabetes and asthma to vaccines, and these allegations are just the tip of a very large iceberg. (The medical establishment's ferocious defense of vaccines as irrefutably safe and beneficial somehow reminds me of the Titanic.)

I am not saying that vaccinations are without value. I am saying that their benefits have been overstated, and their dangers dismissed much too carelessly.

QUESTIONS. The Black Death is estimated to have killed one third of the population of Europe before it subsided. Why did it subside? Largely because the immune system is a marvelously adaptable instrument which learned, naturally, how to cope with the plague.

Interesting though it is that one out of three died of the plague, it is even more interesting that two out of three lived. Why?

Although the headlines alarmed us all when some people died as a result of the swine flu vaccine and some people died when exposed to Legionnaire's disease, it is even more interesting that most people survived. Why? Why are some children injured by MMR shots and others not?

The answer is that people are very different, in many ways. Part of the difference is genetic. Another part is environmental. We can't do much about the genetic part vaccine-induced disease, by dealing intelligently with the environment.

TOXIC EXPOSURE. It is no secret that our environment is loaded with toxins, many of which greatly impair not only the brain but also the immune system. Lead, mercury, pesticides, and solvents all can create havoc with the immune system. There is of course a huge literature on this topic. Two excellent recent books are: Our Toxic World: Who is Looking After our Kids? by H. E. Buttram, M.D., and Richard Piccolo (1 996), and Is This Your Child’s World? by Doris Rapp, M.D. (1997).

NUTRITION. In my view, the most important, and by far the most feasible, approach to preventing damage by toxins of all kinds, including the toxins in vaccines (vaccines contain mercury, aluminum and formaldehyde, in addition to germs) is to help the child's developing, immature immune system by providing generous amounts of the nutrients the body needs if it is going to be able to protect itself from a dangerous, toxin-laden world.

I n his book Ever .y Second Child (1 98 1), Archie Kalokerinos, an Australian physician, tells us that the death rate among the aborigine children he was assigned to help was an astounding 50%! His investigation showed these deaths to be associated with vaccinations, and he found the children's diets to be severely deficient in vitamin C. By merely administering vitamin C (I 00 mg per month of age), he dropped the death rate to nearly zero.

In my view, and in the view of many others who have studied these problems, every mother-to-be, starting well before conception, should be taking significant (several grams a day, at least) amounts of vitamin C, and every child should also be given supplements-especially in view of the stress on the immune system imposed by vaccines.

But vitamin C is by no means the only nutrient that should be supplemented if the immune system is to develop and function effectively. Nutrients known to be effective in autism, vitamin B6 and DMG, have been shown in laboratory studies to enhance immune function. The minerals zinc and selenium, both implicated in many cases of autism, are critical in immune function.

Nutrition is the single most important determinant of immune function, according to world authority R. K. Chandra, who specifically mentions zinc, selenium, iron, copper, vitamins A, C, E, B6, and folic acid.

The message is very clear: mothers should take a high quality, broad-spectrum vitamin and mineral supplement before conception, and during pregnancy and lactation. And every child should also be getting extra nutrients through mother's milk or along with food, if the immune system is to develop property. The cost of not doing so may be very high.¹⁸

Neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) is a fairly rare but serious side effect on many psychiatric drugs. Symptoms of the disorder include rigid muscles, altered consciousness, high fever, and hypertension. While the condition usually can be reversed, NMS is often fatal. Although NMS can be treated with drugs, S.M. Dursun and colleagues not that “drug treatments should be used with extreme caution especially in elderly patients with concomitant medical illness since these drugs may cause further deterioration." A less dangerous alternative, they suggest, is treatment with vitamin E and vitamin B6. The researchers report on a recent case involving a 74-year-old woman with schizoaffective disorder, who developed NMS during treatment with risperidone and other drugs. Dursun et al. treated the woman with 1600 IU/day of vitamin E and 200 mg/ day of vitamin B6, because they regarded drug treatment as too dangerous given the woman's fragile medical condition. The researchers report that their patient fully recovered from NMS. "Interestingly," they say, "her brief psychiatric rating scale [a measure of psychiatric symptom severity] also decreased from 74 down to 45." Vitamin E also is being used to treat tardive dyskinesia (TD), another neurological disorder caused by psychotropic drugs (see ARRI 10/2, 8/3). Some researchers speculate that vitamin therapy reduces drug-induced neurological symptoms because it reduces the damage done to the brain by free radicals. This would explain, Dursun and colleagues say, "why advanced age, smoking, and alcohol abuse, which are all associated with increased radical production or damage, are risk factors for TD." However, they say, there also is evidence that vitamin E can protect against drug-induced hypersensitivity of the brain's dopamine system. Dursun et al. believe this could explain why their patient's psychiatric symptoms, as well as her NMS symptoms, improved when she received vitamin therapy. Given their findings, the researchers say, "it is interesting to postulate whether the use of vitamin E could help prevent recurrence of NMS in people who require neuroleptics and yet are sensitive to even the newer antipsychotics." They note that one large scale study showed an unusually low rate of tardive dyskinesia in patients using neuroleptic drugs for long periods but also receiving high doses of vitamins including vitamin E. "High-dose vitamin E plus vitamin B6 treatment of risperidone-related neuroleptic malignant syndrome," S. M. Dursun, 0. J. Oluboka, S. Devarajan, and S. P. Kutcher; Journal of Psycbophai7nacology, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1998, pp. 220-22. ¹⁸