Tips From The Professor:
D-Creasing
Respiratory Infections
In Your Children This Winter
By Dr Stephen G Chaney
10/09/2012 07:00:35 EDT
The winter cold and flu season is almost upon us. And
if you're like many
parents, you're probably wondering
how many respiratory infections your kids
are going to
get this Winter. You can't wrap your kids in a plastic
bubble
that will keep all the germs away, but you can
make sure that your kids are
getting the nutrition they
need for a healthy immune system - and vitamin
D
appears to play an important role in keeping their
immune system
healthy.
It has been postulated for years that a low blood level
of
vitamin D in the winter months is an important
contributor to the increased
risk of colds and flu
during the winter. And, a number of recent studies
have
shown that people with higher blood levels of vitamin D
are less
likely to succumb to colds and flu during the
winter months.
These
studies are clearly consistent with the
hypothesis that optimal vitamin D
status plays an
important role in preventing respiratory infections
such
as colds and flu. However, all of the studies of
been done so far are
associative and do not prove cause
and effect.
Dr. Carlos Carmargo and
associates from Harvard Medical
School and Massachusetts General Hospital
(Pediatrics,
doi: 10.1542/peds.2011-3029) set out to test this
hypothesis
with a double-blind, placebo-controlled
intervention study - the gold
standard for clinical
studies.
They conducted this study with 250
Mongolian school
children during the winter months. Half of the
children
received milk fortified with 300 IU of vitamin D each
day, while
the other half received unfortified milk.
Over the course of the winter
vitamin D supplementation
decreased the risk of respiratory infection in
those
children by 50%, and that difference was
highly
significant.
Why, you might be asking, do this study with
Mongolian
children instead of children in this country? If you
think about
it the answer is pretty obvious.
Mongolia is a very poor country. They
don't routinely
fortify their milk with vitamin D. And during the
winter
months their sun exposure is minimal. As a
result the children in this study
were clearly vitamin
D deficient at the beginning of the study. Their
blood
levels were 7 ng/mL (17 nmol/L), and anything below 10
ng/mL is
considered clearly deficient. For those who
received the vitamin D
supplementation, their blood
levels increased to 19 ng/mL (47 nmol/L) - a
level
considered adequate but not optimal.
In contrast, only 40-60% of
children in the United
States and Canada have low blood levels of vitamin
D,
so the study would have had to be much larger to show a
significant
effect of supplementation on winter
respiratory infections.
This is
the very first double-blind, placebo controlled
intervention study of its
kind, and it clearly confirms
that adequate vitamin D levels reduce the risk
of
respiratory infections and that supplementation with
vitamin D can help
prevent those respiratory infections
if one's vitamin D status is not
optimal.
My recommendation is to ask your physician to check
blood
levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (the most accurate
measure of vitamin D status)
for both you and your
children and consider supplementing with extra
vitamin
D during the winter months if warranted.
To Your
Health!
Dr. Stephen G Chaney
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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