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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