ANEURINE (thiamine) 



Infants of about six months of age require at least 200 mg. of 

 aneurine daily/® and this can normally be supplied when the mother's 

 milk contains 20 mg. or more of aneurine per 100 ml. 



An attempt to evaluate the effect on the aneurine requirements of 

 man of bacterial synthesis in the intestine was made by Alexander 

 et al.^"^ They defined the minimum aneurine requirement as the 

 amount utilised or otherwise altered in body metabolism plus the 

 amount required to cover uncontrollable losses from the body. When 

 subjects were maintained on a restricted intake of aneurine, excretion 

 of the vitamin fell to a point where its concentration was too small to 

 be measured. In computing the daily minimum requirement, there- 

 fore, the urinary aneurine can be deducted from the intake. The 

 minimum requirement for a male consuming 2400 cals. per day was 

 in this way found to be 0-44 mg. per 1000 cals. or i-o6 mg. per day. 

 An increase in the intake of aneurine increased the urinary excretion 

 of aneurine and of a related factor that accelerated yeast fermentation. 

 When the intake exceeded 1-3 mg. the increase of this second factor 

 must also be subtracted from the aneurine intake, because it represents 

 aneurine breakdown. Alexander et al. suggested that the amount of 

 aneurine and cocarboxylase in the faeces could be ignored, since they 

 are the result of bacterial synthesis and exist within the cells of the 

 micro-organisms . 



M. L. Hathaway and J. E. Strom ^^ recommended a daily allow- 

 ance for women of i-i to i-2 mg., whilst Oldham et al}^ recommended 

 a total daily intake for young women of 20 /xg. per kg. of body weight, 

 say, 1-2 mg. per day. 



It is instructive to compare these estimates with the actual intake 

 of aneurine in this country during the 1939-45 war. The civilian 

 consumption per head per day was about i-2 mg. in 1939 and rose 

 steadily to a value of 1-87 mg. in 1947.^^ Experience showed that 

 0'35 mg. per 1000 cals. was marginal and that signs of vitamin B^ 

 deficiency appeared with 0-25 mg. per 1000 cals. Deficiency was 

 rarely encountered in the Netherlands, however, during 1944-45, when 

 the inhabitants were subsisting on a starvation diet, because the 

 aneurine/calorie ratio remained above the limiting value, whereas a 

 deficiency was common in Japanese prison camps where white rice 

 was the basic cereal and the diet contained less than 0-2 mg. of aneurine 

 per 1000 cals. 21 



References to Section 16 



1. T. B. Osborne, L. B. Mendel and H. C. Cannon, /. Biol. Chem., 



1922, 54, 739. 



2. G. R. Cowgill, " The Vitamin B Requirement of Man ", New 



Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1934. 



84 



