Vitamin D may help treat asthma says study

By Caribbean Medical News Staff

Researchers have concluded that vitamin D may indeed assist in a range of medical diseases including heart disease, diabetes and some cancers while suggesting that a recent review article suggests that vitamin D supplementation is useful in the treatment of asthma. The findings appear in the September issue of the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

Asthma gets worse in winter

“The biggest issue is whether or not vitamin deficiency can be related to a worsening of asthma, and all the studies have been single-point in time studies, and the concern is that depending on where you live, you can be vitamin D-deficient in the winter, but not in the summer,” says Thomas B. Casale, MD, a professor of medicine and the Chair of allergy and immunology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. “We know that asthma gets worse in winter, when vitamin D is down,” he says.

Vitamin D is known especially in non-tropical climates as the “the sunshine vitamin” because our bodies produce it when we are exposed to sunlight. Sources of food based vitamin D include fish, eggs and dairy products. Vitamin D is also added to milk and multivitamins as a supplement.

According to reports the researchers reviewed nearly 60 years’ worth of literature on vitamin D status and asthma.  They discovered that vitamin D deficiency is linked to “increased airway reactivity, lower lung functions, and worse asthma control. Risk factors for vitamin D deficiency include obesity, being African-American and living in Westernized countries”, the researchers report. These are also populations at higher risk for developing asthma.

Asthma improves

The report further suggested that Vitamin D supplementation may improve asthma control by blocking the inflammation-causing proteins in the lung while increasing the production of protein interleukin-10, which has anti-inflammatory effect.

The researchers said that the next step will include long-term trials which examine the efficacy of vitamin D supplementation with people with asthma.

“If we give supplemental vitamin D and measure asthma outcomes over a year, do you get better and that is the key. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence, but we need to do definitive studies with vitamin D interventions to see what happens,” the researchers concluded.

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