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Vitamin B12 and acne

19.07.2015

Acne, or inflammation of the sebaceous glands, which causes so many problems for teenagers, occurs for a number of reasons: there may be a genetic predisposition, and excessive activity of sex hormones with immunity, and increased sebum secretion of the skin glands. However, the main culprits are usually Propionibacterium acnes bacteria, which feed on sebum and irritate the immune system, which triggers an inflammatory response.

But the mere presence of P. acnes does not necessarily cause acne: this bacterium is one of the most common microbes in the skin microflora, and in many people it lives quite peacefully, without giving itself away. Obviously, the whole point here is that the bacteria living on the skin of people with acne, and the bacteria living on the skin of people without acne, have different genes, and therefore our immune system reacts differently to both.

But why do some genes turn on in one case, and others in the other? Vitamin B12 may be to blame, as Huiying Li and her colleagues at UCLA have shown. It is necessary for the formation of red blood cells, for the normal functioning of the nervous system and for some metabolic reactions; and can usually be found in any multivitamin complex. B12 can be synthesized by archaea and bacteria, including P. acnes.

If a person without acne was given a portion of the vitamin, then the bacteria living on his skin began to work weaker genes responsible for the synthesis of B12. And after a week, one in ten people who received a dose of the vitamin developed characteristic acne, and after two weeks, gene activity in bacteria living on previously healthy skin became the same as bacteria living on acne-prone skin. That is, an excess of B12 forced the bacteria to suppress their own synthesis of the vitamin. But at the same time, as the researchers write in an article in Science Translational Medicine, P. acnes began to synthesize porphyrins that stimulate inflammation.

For the first time that B12 could be associated with unhealthy skin, they started talking back in the 50s of the twentieth century, so it would seem that new data confirms old suspicions. However, not everything is so simple here: according to other sources, the same B12 has an anti-inflammatory effect. In other words, before making clinical recommendations, you should double-check whether there is really a causal relationship between the vitamin, bacteria and acne. To do this, the experiment should be repeated with a large number of participants in order to be sure that individual differences do not distort the final result for us.

In addition, vitamin supplements do not contain as much B12 compared to what is usually administered in experiments. On the other hand, two years ago, the same research group published a paper describing different strains of P. acnes, "good" and "bad", that respectively lived on healthy skin and diseased skin. It may well be that the "bad" strains are more sensitive to B12 and can trigger inflammation even with a slight excess of the vitamin.

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