Vitamin D Insufficiency Shown as Link to Asthma and Allergies Severity

[Dave]

A new study is being reported on which provides evidence for a link
between vitamin D insufficiency and asthma severity.

In Costa Rica, more than 600 children had their serum levels of
Vitamin D tested, and these were inversely linked to several
indicators of allergy and asthma severity. It seems that
hospitalizations for asthma, use of inhaled steroids and total IgE
levels were both shown to be much higher whenever Vitamin D was
insufficient. This study will appear in the first issue for May of the
"American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine."

Costa Rica is a country known to have a high prevalence of asthma.
Juan Celedón, M.D. and his colleague Augusto Litonjua, M.D. of Harvard
Medical School recruited 616 children with asthma to be assessed for
allergic markers, including both allergen-specific and general
sensitivity tests, and assessed for lung function and circulating
vitamin D levels.

They found that children with lower vitamin D levels were
significantly more likely to have been hospitalized for asthma in the
previous year; these youngsters also tended to have airways with
increased hyperreactivity and were likely to have used more inhaled
corticosteroids. They were also significantly more likely to have
several markers of allergy, including dust-mite sensitivity.

“This study suggests that there may be added health benefits to
vitamin D supplementation” said Dr. Celedón. Current recommendations
for optimal vitamin D levels are geared toward preserving bone health,
such as preventing rickets in children and osteoporosis in adults. But
these levels may not be sufficient to deal with issues of allergies
and asthma.

“This study also provides epidemiological support for a growing body
of in vitro evidence that vitamin D insufficiency may worsen asthma
severity, and we suspect that giving vitamin D supplements to asthma
patients who are deficient may help with their asthma control” wrote
the authors, noting that a clinical trial should be the next step in
this research.

“Whether vitamin D supplementation can prevent the development of
asthma in very young children is a separate question, which will be
answered by clinical trials that are getting under way,” he said.

Dave

Full text article above extracted from http://www.shamvswham.com/ ---
Full research study linked to headline of blog post