Does vitamin A aid learning?
By John Travis
From New Orleans, at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
Vitamin A deficiency is one of the most common nutritional problems in the world. It permanently blinds children, causes night blindness in adults, and weakens the immune system. A study of mice now hints that a lack of vitamin A causes learning and memory problems, albeit potentially reversible ones.
Investigators at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla previously studied mutant mice lacking the cell-surface proteins that vitamin A and its derivatives stimulate.