A meal being arranged at a Jammu hospital. File picture

New Delhi, May 11: Vitamin B1 deficiency might still account for unexplained heart failure in India, medical researchers have said, more than a century after the deficiency was shown to be linked to the consumption of polished rice.

Beriberi, which Dutch physicians had shown in 1897 as the result of Vitamin B1 deficiency, might explain up to 5 per cent of heart failure cases, a study by doctors at the Sheri Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in Srinagar has shown.

“We’re either looking at a resurgence of an old problem or it might have been overlooked,” said Iqbal Kurshid, a senior cardiologist at the institute.

Kurshid and his colleagues have found that among a group of 650 patients with heart failure who visited their hospital over three years, 27 did not have any obvious causes of heart failure — such as coronary heart disease, valve disease or high blood pressure.

The doctors then examined the level of Vitamin B1, also known as thiamine, in the patients and found that each had a severe thiamine deficiency. But why the patients had low thiamine levels is still unclear, they said.

“It’s puzzling,” said Kurshid. “We are primarily a rice eating country and consumption of polished rice has been known to cause Vitamin B1 deficiency. But other members of the families of these patients did not have the deficiency. So there could be other factors,” he said.

Rice loses Vitamin B1 when its coat of bran is stripped off. Carbohydrate-loaded junk food might also contribute to Vitamin B1 deficiency, but without detailed diet histories of patients, the doctors said, it would be hard to pinpoint the cause of the deficiency.

“The great thing is that cardiac beriberi is reversible, simply by administering thiamine (Vitamin B1),” Kurshid said over the phone.

“Patients recovered within hours to a few days,” he said.

Although the institute doctors received patients primarily from Jammu and Kashmir, they believe their findings may also apply to other parts of the country. “We mainly see patients from rural areas, but the food practices in rural areas elsewhere in India is not too different from what they are here,” Kurshid said.

The researchers, whose findings appeared last week in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, believe cardiologists in other states should keep Vitamin B1 deficiency in mind when dealing with unexplained cases of heart failure. “Five per cent could translate into a very large number across India,” Kurshid said.

Dutch physician Christiaan Eijkman and a colleague had shown in 1897 that polished rice could lead to Vitamin B1 deficiency. By the 1920s, according to publications by British doctors posted in India, beriberi in India had been linked to the consumption of polished rice.