Nerve tingles - are they caused by methylation healing?

First, let me state that i did hurt my back a few months ago and most of my nerve tingles (like being blasted by sand) are in my back, but all over as apposed to the back pain which is only in the middle. I also get them in my neck, the nerve tingles.

I have upped my dose of B12 recently, and i wonder if its that?

Anyone know? Anyone had the same?

Is it a good sign, or a bad one? Or maybe its unrelated.

Vitamin B12, especially methylcobalamin, is known to induce hypokalemia (low potassium). This could explain the tingling sensations. Have you tried increasing your consumption of potassium rich foods such as blackstrap molasses which contains like 600mg of potassium per tablespoon?

I dont think its potassium related. I had a bad experience of low potatsium a month or two ago and ended up at hospital. Since then i take quite alot of potassium (about 3000mg) each day to supplement my diet.

Hi snowathlete,
Just my 2 cents. Excess potassium can produce tingling sensations.
mogy.

thanks Moggy. I didnt know that, but it could be excess pottasium couldnt it. Hummm, what to do about that. Well, i think i will cut it back a bit and see if that helps.

I've just started to learn about this so I don't know much myself, but some people here talk about
B12 deficiency/neurological symptoms that are relieved with B12. If that's what's going on with you then the tingling sounds like a good thing from what I've heard. Hopefully someone who knows more about this can explain further. It seems like there's only a subset of people here with this issue. Some people say they "have a B12 deficiency, but not CFS" while others say they have both B12 deficiency symptoms and CFS. This language is kind of confusing because Rich has said that most of us here have a "functional B12 deficiency" due to glutathione depletion. This seems to be different since only a portion of the people here have the neurological/B12 deficiency symptoms, but I assume most of us have a "functional B12 deficiency".

Hi - yep, I have had the same thing since I started mB12 + metafolin. I actually thought I was having 'depersonalization' because my hands and feet were so numb that they don't even seem like they are mine... The first dose I took of mB12 caused them to start tingling. Not a bad tingle, but they feel kind of buzzy or something? Like my blood vessels are full of carbonation bubbles... Fizzy feeling, not as sharp as pins and needles. And now I notice them tingling every day.

I have noticed it in my hands, feet, and scalp. In fact, my feet are tingling at the moment... They are starting to feel alive and attached instead of numb and dead. It has made me wonder if the 'depersonalization' was simply a peripheral neuropathy that came with my flare up about 6 months back.

Someone else in another thread who has B12 deficiency symptoms such as neuropathy said the tingling also happened with them. It sounds like a good thing (as long as it's not due to low potassium)

Hi Snowathlete,

When I get effective MeCbl It ramps up the many sensations of damaged nerves. What I waztch is the progression. If it then goes to shooting pains, constant pains, painful tingling etc and fading to hypersensitive and regaining feeling. The hypersensitive then fades to more normal like feeling. On the other hand if it progresses towards numbness it's going the wrong way. In the large areas of my back in which I had physically damaged nerves and lots of pain and RSD areas, the nerves went through the same things more or less. The good news is that all the changes with RSD, (coarse skin etc,) have gone away and the pain is gone and I have normal feeling now. It took 9 months for each cycle, a new one of which started again and again each tome I added a new item that made a difference. So I had a round triggered by each of the Deadlock Quartet as well as SAM-e, zinc, and some other things. For the CNS, I didn't get healing until I got the MeCbl dosage high enough and that made no other discernible difference in the body. The nervous system is low speed healing. With the kind of damage I have it's like I am always on an edge of either healing or deteriorating, like an equilibrium process and the equilibrium point can be shifted towards or away from healing. It take me about 2 weeks to tell for sure which way changes are going after a change. Up to a certain point more MeCbl and AdoCbl increase the neurological intensity (tingling too) and that increase appears indicative of healing direction. On the other hand Glutathione and/or NAC push that towards numbness reducing pain and worsening neurological functioning and healing. In severe paradoxical folate insufficiency the nerves get worse.

Hi Lotus,

For both methylfolate and MeCbl/AdoCbl, one can have apparently paradoxical effects; one layer can get worse while another layer is healing. In stead of a smooth proportionality to dose it is whole sections starting or stopping. This is because of the bodies "triage" system as it has been called, perhaps. In any case, for b12 and folate insufficiency symptoms can occur all the way from dying of them to having one or two minor symptoms left, all of those being functional deficiencies some of which cause damage as they are maintained. I think that there has been a lot of struggling to make the distinctions. A person can have functional b12 deficiency symptoms all the way up to 30-50mg injected a day for those with CNS involvement. On the other hand body insufficiency symptoms (functional symptoms) can be present all the way up to at least a serum level of 3000-10,000 pg/ml. THat is one reason serum testing is useless to tell sufficiency and wrongly interpreted so that 170 is the low cutoff. In Japan with MeCbl being the official b12 and the low warning at 550pg/ml the Alzheimer's rate is 20% of the USA's.

I get tingles and muscle twitches from MethylCobalamin. It seems distinct from low potassium for me. I don't know what high potassium feels like but it would be interesting to know. I guess a lot of us here are trying to sort out what sensations mean what on the b12 protocols. I hope they are a positive thing in your case.

Yah, I have been trying to figure this out as well. It is pretty touch and go. I had been pretty steady with the 800 methylfolate and 1000 methyl b12.. this caused some start-up which was mostly fatigue and ickiness. I assumed it was potassium and upped that, taking like 200 mg every couple of hours. It seemed to help a little, but I'm not sure. About a week into the start-up I started having fairly constant tingling. It is not the same as the lack of B12 tingling that felt more like pins and needles, it is more like what is described above.. almost like a fizziness. It does feel like, as Fredd says, that the old damaged nerves are being activated.

So, I experimented a bit just to see if it helped. Last weekend I was going on vacation and decided to back off the Folate and B12 for a few days.. just 2. And sure enough no discernible tingling. Then, I returned home and upped the b12 for a few days to see if that made a difference (thinking maybe it was an insufficiency). And it seems that taking more b12 leads to more tingling and nausea... and headaches. So, I have deduced that it is an activation of nerves AND maybe still a bit of a potassium thing. So, the real question is, is this tingling ever gonna go away?! Or do we just have to keep throwing b12 and folate at it and hope that it doesn't drive us too far down the potassium rabbit hole. Such a slippery slope. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

You could take extra B3. B3 uses up SAMe so it will slow down methylation. This might be a bad thing if you're an undermethylator, but if you're having problems with too much methylation it might be helpful. I'm not sure if the coenzymated forms of B3 have this quality so you'd probably want to take one of the non-coenzymated forms. Either inositol hexanicotinate, niacin, or niacinamide. I don't know the difference, but someone said niacinamide helped them with anxiety so that's the one I'm taking. There's more about this from Dr. Ben