A pelagra em Portugal: entre carência nutritiva e intoxicação alimentar

Abstract

The improvement in living conditions in recent decades, with reflections on a more diversified and accessible diet to the population, allowed to eradicate some diseases caused by malnutrition, as in the case of pellagra.A nutritional disorder caused by a deficiency of vitamin B3 (niacin), with serious complications at the dermatological, gastrointestinal and mental level, affected mainly the most disadvantaged populations, whose diet was based on the prolonged and almost exclusive consumption of maize, with an endemic character in several European countries. This article aims to provide a historical and endemiological framework for the disease of the rose, and later to evaluate the effects of knowledge about the disease in Portugal at the beginning of the 20th century.