Inositol

By Trevor Shewfelt, Pharmacist at the Dauphin Clinic Pharmacy

We now have this and most other articles published in the Parkland Shopper on our Website. Please visit us at www.dcp.ca

The information in this article is intended as a helpful guide only. It is not intended to be used as a substitute for professional advice. If you have any questions about your medications and what is right for you see your doctor, pharmacist or other health care professional.

My sister is a physiotherapist in Langley, BC. Physiotherapists give great advice that weak willed people like me have trouble following. You have tennis elbow? Do these exercises and it will go away and the muscles will get strong enough that it won’t come back. Sore back? Work on building up your core abdominal muscles and improve your posture. The problem is that I am lazy. I’d rather not do the exercises. I’d rather take a pill, kill the pain and go play Rec Hockey. The next day I wonder why my elbow and back are sore again. Maybe I should have done the exercises.

As much as I am obviously for “taking a pill” to solve medical problems, I was wondering about my sister the physiotherapist and taking the easy way out when talking about inositol. Inositol in a B vitamin. We can get it by eating whole grains and nuts. We have been told for years that we should eat more whole foods and less highly processed stuff. That means eating things like pumpernickel bread instead of white bread or freshly caught fish instead of fish sticks. One of the reasons to eat whole foods is that you get more vitamins like inositol that way. Lately, thought, we starting getting a run on inositol capsules in the pharmacy.

The reason inositol has been so popular is that there have been news reports that it might treat cancer. Inositol might treat anxiety, depression and “calm the thoughts”. Inositol might also treat diabetes and protect the skin from UVB radiation. Remember I said, “Might”. Although inositol is showing promise, it is probably too early to start recommending it to treat things. There have been many promising treatments in the past that didn’t turn out to work. Let’s start by discussing the cancer trial.

Dr. Stephen Lam of the B.C. Cancer Agency gave smokers with at least one bronchial dysplagia in their lungs a bunch of inositol. Adysplagia is a pre-cancerous area. He gave them up to 30 g of inositol a day but found most of them only tolerated 18 g per day. So they gave a new bunch of smokers with pre-cancerous lesions 18 g per day of inositol (the maximum tolerated dose) for 3 months. The smokers who got the 18 g of inositol had more of their pre-cancerous lesions go back to non-cancerous areas than the placebo group. The inositol group also had their blood pressure drop compared to the placebo group.

This is very interesting research. Does a B vitamin treat cancer? Does a B vitamin treat blood pressure? These are good questions for further research. Unfortunately, they are not good reasons to run to the pharmacy and self treat your lung cancer. Does inositol make actual lung cancer tumors grow faster or slower? We don’t know. Does inositol cause pre-lung cancer cells to go back to normal but cause liver pre-cancer cell to grow? We don’t know. And so on. The other problem is this was a preliminary trial. There were not enough subjects enrolled in the trial for us to be confident about the results. The more subjects in a trial, the stronger the results.

The same goes for inositol treating diabetes. Inositol seems to help diabetic rats. Very interesting but rats aren’t people. Inositol when mixed with another antioxidant called IP6 and put on the skin of mice seems to protect the mice from UBV radiation. Again interesting, but mice aren’t people. What about inositol and depression? Well I found a Cochrane Review of 4 trials of inositol and depression which covered 141 patients. The results were inconclusive, and again 141 is not enough subjects.

But inositol is only a vitamin. It won’t hurt me, and there is a chance it will help. Why not take it? I do have a hard time arguing with that. As far as we know inositol is safe in most people, most of the time. We don’t know if it will help cancer, blood pressure, anxiety, diabetes, etc. If you want to spend you money on inositol supplements, that is your choice. However, you may also want to wait until the scientists figure out if inositol really does help cancer, blood pressure, anxiety, diabetes, etc, because there have been many false hopes in the past.

Which brings me back to the easy way out. Maybe most of us shouldn’t be looking for that one magic supplement distilled from food. Maybe we should just eat whole, healthly foods like grains, nuts, mushrooms, veggies and fish. If they contain one magic ingredient like inositol, I wonder how many more they contain that we haven’t discovered yet? And maybe I should do my exercises.

As always if you have any questions or concerns about these or other products, ask your pharmacist.