How good can the body use blood levels?

[Santino]

Hello,

I have a specific question and you would help me if you focus just on the question without asking why I ask this of if I tried other ways etc and that I should use active folate etc...Please just focus on this question. That would help me a lot. Thank you!


The purpose is to lower homocysteine:

Assuming a person can handle folic acid well:

Would injecting 5mg every 5days work just as good as 1mg every day or even: Would injecting 10mg of folic acid every 10 days work just as good as using 1mg everyday?

Of course I know that maybe on the 10th days the 1mg/day group might have lower homocysteine but I mean in the long term. SO if you follow this protocol for 3 months. Would there be any disadvantage (only regarding the purpose of lowering homocysteine) when you wont take it daily but take higher amounts?

Edit:
From scientific trials I only know that 2.5mg or 5mg (daily!!) folic daily dont work better than 1mg daily but 1mg was better than 500mcg.

But of course this does not answer anything regarding the question...

 

[Snowdrop]

Scroll down to the section on dosage. This might help you with an answer.
http://www.livescience.com/51670-folate-folic-acid-vitamin-b9.html

 

[Santino]

Hello Snowdrop,

I read the text below dosage. Unfortunately they don't give any answer on that. I also doubt that the information stated there as it has been shown that plasma levels of folic acid increase with intake of high doses of folic acid. Injection of 20mg folic acid is even a strategy in severely deficient patients.

I really need to know whether 5mg oder even higher doses injected every 5 or 10 days is just as good as 1mg/day.

In studies they now most often use 1mg/day because the found it works best. But they did not test whether they could also use 5mg every 5 days. They only tested whether 5mg/day works better than 1mg/day and found that higher doses than 1mg don't bring any beneficial effect more than 1mg/day...

 

[Santino]

The problem is:

When you ingest folic acid, it is converted to the forms usable for the body in the liver but this works with only up to 1mg or less. The rest will remain unchanged in the blood serum as folic acid.

The question is, can the body pick up the leftover folic acid efficiently the next days when no folic acid is taken?

That is the question because if not, it would mean that 5mg injections every 5th day would not work and may even be harmful whereas 1mg/day would work great (at least for most people which are not homozygous C667T).

 

[CFS_for_19_years]

Since folic acid is a water soluble vitamin (can't be stored in the body) my guess is that a lower dose done on a daily basis would be better than a higher dose administered less frequently. If you think of the dose appearing as a huge peak, then a trough that falls close to zero after one day, there will be fewer peaks and valleys with more frequent dosing. If you dose once a week with 5mg, you'd get a huge peak, but the folic acid might only stay in your body for two days.

To answer this definitively, you need to find the half-life of folic acid when it is injected. If half-life by injection can't be found, then you might be able to substitute half-life by the oral route, to estimate how long it stays in the body.

Edit:
From scientific trials I only know that 2.5mg or 5mg (daily!!) folic daily dont work better than 1mg daily but 1mg was better than 500mcg.

Perhaps 1mg daily is enough to saturate all tissues, and any more than that will just show up in your pee. Perhaps 500mcg (that's micrograms, not milligrams) falls far short of saturating the tissues.

 

[Santino]

I found a study where they found exactly what you are saying CFS for 19 year.

However they first saturated people with folic acid by giving them orally 5mg daily until blood levels did not rise anymore than that.

Then they injected 5mg and found a huge increase in blood levels which were back to old after 12h.

However those people were totally saturated with folate. So not 100% the same situation.

All over I think that I cannot expect the same results with injections every few day unfortunately. Because I get the same side effects from 5 or 10mg compared 1mg. I could not have the side effects daily but once a week would be ok.

Best regards