There’s so much vitamin D news and headlines out there these days, it’s getting hard to keep up with! From what we can tell at our clinic, this is the type of PR that vitamin D deficiency deserves.

1. I really get excited when I see news reports like this. The focus of the report is on vitamin D and heart disease, there’s a good article to go along with it. The surprise of the cardiologist regarding the number of her patients she found with vitamin D deficiency is exactly what we experienced at our clinic!

2. Here’s a decent article about D deficiency, but what primarily caught my eye was this quote:

University of Washington heart surgeon Donald Miller Jr. tested 78 of his patients and found three-quarters had “insufficient” levels of vitamin D.

“It was really pretty shocking,” Miller said.

(That’s 2 separate shocked cardiologists in 2 articles!)

3. Vitamin D deficiency found it’s way into the New York Times - “The so-called sunshine vitamin is poised to become the nutrient of the decade…”

1. Dr. Davis (cardiologist and owner of The Heart Scan Blog) has a new post about how over the past 2 1/2 years has not prescribed any pre-diabetes medications and instead now prescribes vitamin D. He says that in his experience the D exceeds the effects of the medications he formerly used. He also discusses the importance of staying off of wheat (I could definitely start a whole new web site dedicated to that important topic!)

2. Pilot study to examine link between vitamin D and insulin resistance : “If we’re right, then the results of this study may one day help support the use of vitamin D in a clinical setting,” says Grossman. “Practitioners could implement this at very low cost, because vitamin D supplements are cheap. Some of the more common treatments currently available for insulin resistance are quite expensive.” Investigators at The Rockefeller University Hospital began screening applicants in January and expect a conclusion to the study in one year.

3. Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine have done a new vitamin D study.

The study included the use of tanning beds and measuring vitamin D blood levels.

“Vitamin D deficiency is common in both children and adults worldwide,” said Michael Holick, PhD, MD, director of the General Clinical Research Center and professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at BUSM and senior author of this study. “Exposure to lamps that emit UVB radiation is an excellent source for producing vitamin D3 in the skin and is especially efficacious in patients with fat malabsortion syndromes.”

The study will appear in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

That’s all for now!

Here’s a common phenomena were seeing at our clinic. Fortunately, more physicians are testing their patient’s vitamin D baselines, hooray, the word is getting out there! Unfortunately, we’re seeing very little in the way of following-up those baseline tests with re-checks to see if the treatments did any good. It’s the re-checking of those blood levels that reveals the problem; that being, what you’d think would be a good strong dose to correct the deficiency falls short much of the time.

Here’s a classic example. One of my wife’s patients came in for an appointment. It came to my wife’s attention that this patient’s other doctor had wisely tested her vitamin D and found that it was low at 25.8 ng/mL (normal range being 32-80). The doctor then instructed the patient to take 1,000 IU’s of vitamin D daily and that they could maybe recheck it in a couple of years. The patient diligently took her 1,000 IU’s of D for 2 months, at which time she came to an appointment at our clinic and had her D re-evaluated. Guess what? Her levels had gone down and were now at 24.2! (remember, she started at 25.8!) Had this re-check level not been done, it’s very likely this person would have lived the next 2 years of her life vitamin D deficient. Certainly the 1,000 IU’s was better than nothing, but it fell way sort of even getting her into the normal range.

It’s this type of case that re-enforces our opinion that it’s important to re-check vitamin D levels in order to verify the effectiveness of the treatment.

James E. Dowd, MD is a pediatric rheumatologist who has come out with a new book about vitamin D deficiency called The Vitamin D Cure. He also has a blog about vitamin D and did a radio show about vitamin D

I should say that one of the reasons my wife and I became interested in vitamin D deficiency was because of our son Abe. Abe had terrible growing pains and excruciating pain in his heal bones. To make a long story short, no one could figure out what was going on with him, and one of the main cures turned-out to be vitamin D. Since I have first hand experience with this particular topic I like this quote from Dr. Dowd’s press release information “sometimes what is dismissed as “bad growing pains” is really an indication of a vitamin D deficiency and dietary deficiencies in children.”

I’ve not yet read his book, if you have, let me know what you think.

I had no idea that mushrooms were a good source of vitamin D until I watched Louise Gagne’s vitamin D presentation. In her discussion she specifically mentions chanterelle mushrooms. I then found this vitamin D study involving white button mushrooms. Just so you know, it’s the ergocalciferol (D2) that is found found in mushrooms, which in Dr Holick opinion can be about 50% less effective than the Colcalciferal (D3). That being said, certainly sounds like a decent way for those with lactose intolerance or vegetarians to get vitamin D. (Personally I can’t stand mushrooms so I’ll be sticking with my Colcalciferal (D3) supplements)

Dr. Vieth is a leading vitamin D researcher. This is a video of a lecture he gave to a non-researcher (people like you and me) audience. I knew that I wanted to get this on the blog, but I’ve been struggling trying to find this for the past week. Dr Vieth presents a lot of very interesting research, charts, and graphs to get his message across. One thing that was obvious to me was his frustration with the lack of publicity, funding, and research on this important topic.

Watch it now!

1. Since I live in the Pacific Northwest I had to post this dramatic news headline about vitamin D deficiency:

Northwest’s lack of sun could put your health in danger

2. Although this is about a month old now, it’s a very good article written in the Vancouver Sun:

Sun’s benefits make comeback

3. Do you like doing your own online research? Here’s one way to learn a lot more about vitamin D deficiency (I grabbed this list/quote out of another article and can’t remember which one, sorry for not giving the list’s author the credit they deserve)

“To learn more about vitamin D deficiency go to Google and enter “vitamin D3” and the names one at a time, of the top scientists in D3 research on the planet: Dr. Reinhold Vieth; Dr. Michael F. Holick and; Dr. Robert Heaney; Edward D. Gorham, MPH, Ph.D.; Cedric F. Garland, Dr.P.H.; Frank C. Garland, Ph.D.; Sharif B. Mohr, MPH; William B. Grant, Ph.D; Martin Lipkin, M.D.; Harold L. Newmark, ScD; Edward Giovannucci, M.D., ScD.”

I have just finished watching this excellent video presentation on vitamin D deficiency. (from oct 2007) The presenter is Louise Gagne MD, a medical doctor who has become intrigued with this epidemic problem.

This is a presentation worth watching, takes about an hour.

I loved that she recommends doctors consider adding vitamin D testing to annual screenings!!

Another thing I liked was her map of the U.S. I’ve had a hard time conceptualizing where exactly UVB exposure diminishes and therefore D deficiency increases. She had a horizontal line drawn from Los Angeles across to Atlanta and said that anyone south of that line had access to good UVB throughout the year; anyone north of that line was subject to more seasonal limitations of UVB. She also used shadows as a helpful tool in knowing if you’re getting UVB exposure. If your shadow is as long as you are (or longer) your not getting adequet UVB during those times.

She goes on to discuss diseases, research, and treatment of vitamin D deficiency.

Enjoy!

p.s. - I noticed that I couldn’t get the video to work in my firefox browser, but it worked fine when I used Internet Explorer.

This is one you’ve got to listen to! Here’s a very informative radio interview with vitamin D expert Michael Holick MD, PhD. He hits all of the main topics including; history, doses, toxicity, disease prevention, etc.

A couple of the things I found interesting about this interview was his mentioning of there being only 2 dozen cases worldwide of vitamin D intoxication in the past 30 years!

Also interesting to me was his mentioning that he’s noticed vitamin D2 to be about half as effective as the vitamin D3 (his preference and the type we use at our clinic). This is what we’ve seen as well for a couple of patients who had been given D2 by different doctors, but since it was only a couple of patients it was not entire clear if it was the D2 or some other reason.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time reading various vitamin D studies regarding toxicity and various opinions regarding how to treat vitamin D deficiency. FYI, a name that continually comes up when reading these studies are Dr. Reinhold Vieth director of the Bone and Mineral Laboratory, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Another name you’ll start to become familiar with in the world of quality vitamin D information is that of endocrinologist Michael Hollick.

I thought I just post a few vitamin D items I’ve found over the past few days. As I mentioned, a lot of this has to do with doses and toxicity:

Dr Davis, a Cardiologist and blogger of The Heart Scan Blog, just posted a message about vitamin D toxicity and the treatment he uses in his practice. He himself takes 10,000 IU’s per day and tries to maintain his level between50-60 ng/ml. It’s really great to see the word on vitamin D getting out there by such reputable and popular sources!

This page I found very interesting since it did a good job (although the paragraphs are jammed together) of summarizing a lot of the studies I had been reading. The author, a practicing physician, seems to have come to a similar conclusion as my wife regarding a good target zone to shoot for as far as vitamin D levels are concerned.

Here’s a study about vitamin D toxicity. The study examines a very tragic accidental over-dose with what someone thought was cooking oil, turns-out it was a veterinary concentration of vitamin D. The serum levels of D in the blood of these 11 patients was incredibly elevated with four of them dying from complications. I converted the measurement in this study to what’s customary here in the U.S. which is ng/mL, you do this by dividing the nmol/L value by a factor of 2.5. These people were at levels between 338-660 ng/mL! If you remember from my earlier post the references ranges on the labwork we use at our clinic are “normal” being between 32-100 ng/mL with the target being between 50-65 ng/mL.

That’s it for now, let me know if you find any other folks out there spreading the word about getting D levels checked and treated!