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!