Cobalamin (vitamin B12) is a water-soluble vitamin essential for many physiological processes including cellular metabolism, DNA synthesis, amino acid metabolism, fatty acid metabolism, nerve myelination and haematopoeisis; it also acts as a co-enzyme in many important enzymatic reactions.
Dietary cobalamin is absorbed via a complex pathway requiring specific binding proteins and receptors. Any disruption to this absorption pathway can result in cobalamin deficiency; examples include exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, damage to the cobalamin-intrinsic factor receptors in the ileum (due to hereditary conditions or disease) and competition from the microbiota in dysbiosis.
Since cobalamin is so important for normal bodily functions, hypocobalaminaemia can present with varied symptoms from intestinal changes, including villous atrophy and malabsorption, to anorexia, weight loss and failure to thrive, to neuropathies and immunodeficiencies. Irrespective of other treatments provided, these clinical signs may not resolve without correcting the cobalamin deficiency.
While most dietary cobalamin requires uptake via this complex pathway, it is believed that 1 percent is absorbed by passive diffusion across the length of the intestines. It has been documented in several studies that oral hypersupplementation is effective at correcting both serum and cellular hypocobalaminaemia in dogs and cats with chronic enteropathies and dogs with EPI or hereditary hypocobalaminaemia (Toresson et al., 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2018; Chang et al., 2022; McCallum and Watson, 2018; Kook and Hersberger, 2018; Sancho et al., 2021).
Should you wish to learn more about cobalamin absorption and deficiencies or oral cobalamin supplementation, please contact your local Protexin Veterinary territory manager to book in a lunch and learn or contact our technical team here.