Vitamin B3 and glaucoma
Promising research can be surprisingly easy to turn into premature certainty.
Vitamin B3, in the form of nicotinamide, is attracting genuine interest in glaucoma research. The biological rationale is plausible, and some early human studies have reported encouraging signals.
But plausible is not the same as proven.
My background in nutrition taught me to be careful with that distinction. A nutrient can be essential for normal function and influence a measurable biological process without necessarily changing the course of a disease.
That matters here because the doses being investigated for glaucoma are not simply what you would get from eating a healthy diet. At gram-level doses, nicotinamide starts to look much more like a therapeutic intervention, bringing questions about dose, duration, monitoring and safety.
So perhaps the more useful question is not: why aren't people with glaucoma taking vitamin B3?
It is: what evidence would we need before they should be?
