ABSTRACT
Key Facts: Vitamin Dešciency in Patients with Terminal Cancer ................................................. 312 Summary Points ............................................................................................................................. 313 Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... 314 List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................................... 314 References ...................................................................................................................................... 314
We are entirely dependent on dietary and other exogenous sources of vitamins to satisfy our requirements. A suboptimal supply of these nutrients disturbs metabolic networks and has a wide variety of repercussions. The šrst half of the twentieth century was the golden age for the identišcation and characterisation of vitamins, discoveries that originated from the detailed investigation of pathological changes induced by severe dešcient states. Sensitive laboratory-based assays for the direct measurements of vitamin blood levels were subsequently developed, and applied to the further study of vitamins in health and disease. Although the determination of circulatory levels gives a good indication of current body stores/dietary exposure for some vitamins, greater insight can often be gained when these assays are used in combination with functional biomarkers that directly re¬ect status within target tissues.
