Vitamin D Protection

Vitamin D protection packs a powerful punch against viral disease.

Do you supplement with Vitamin D?

How familiar are you with all the newly researched benefits of this little vitamin?

Want to know much protection this little vitamin has to offer?

I received an email the other day full of information about Vitamin D. Turns out it plays a critical role in protecting our respiratory system. How important is that with Covid-19 symptoms!

25 years ago, my integrative medicine doc educated me on the importance of Vitamin D and how best to utilize. Malabsorption of nutrients is common with aging (becomes an issue post-teen years) and I was advised to take a liquid micro-emulsion drop because it would enhance the absorption.

This method is called sublingual , drops under the tongue, packing a punch of three to ten times greater absorption than tablet or capsule form. I take Bio-D-Mulsion Forte from Biotics Research.

Your blood is the river to your health and yearly blood draws will allow your medical professional a birds eye view. Your test results will reveals how much Vitamin D you need.

Anyway… on to the email message from Harvard Medical School.

Hello. This is Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

I’d like to talk with you about vitamin D and COVID-19. Is there potentially a protective role

We’ve known for a long time that it’s important to avoid vitamin D deficiency for bone health, cardiometabolic health, and other purposes. But it may be even more important now than ever. There’s emerging and growing evidence that vitamin D status may be relevant to the risk of developing COVID-19 infection and to the severity of the disease.

Vitamin D is important to innate immunity and boosts immune function against viral diseases. We also know that vitamin D has an immune-modulating effect and can lower inflammation, and this may be relevant to the respiratory response during  Covid-19 and the cytokine storm that’s been demonstrated.

There are laboratory (cell-culture) studies of respiratory cells that document some of these effects of vitamin D. There’s also evidence that patients with respiratory infections tend to have lower blood levels of 25-hydroxy-vitamin D.

There’s now some evidence from COVID-19 patients as well. In an observational study from three South Asian hospitals, the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency was much higher among those with severe COVID illness compared with those with mild illness. In fact, there was about an eightfold higher risk of having severe illness among those who entered with vitamin D deficiency compared with those who had sufficient vitamin D levels.

There’s also evidence from a meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials of vitamin D supplementation looking at acute respiratory tract infections (upper and lower). This was published in the British Medical Journal 2 years ago, showing that vitamin D supplementation was associated with a significant reduction in these respiratory tract infections. Overall, it was only a 12% reduction, but among the participants who had profound vitamin D deficiency at baseline (such as a blood level of 25-hydroxy-vitamin D of less than 10 ng/mL), there was a 70% lower risk of respiratory infection with vitamin D supplementation.

So the evidence is becoming quite compelling. It’s important that we encourage our patients to be outdoors and physically active, while maintaining social distancing. This will lead to increased synthesis of vitamin D in the skin, just from the incidental sun exposure.

Diet is also important. Everyone should be reading food labels which list the vitamin D content. Food sources that are higher in vitamin D include fortified dairy products, fortified cereals, fatty fish, and sun-dried mushrooms.

For patients who are unable to be outdoors and also have low dietary intake of vitamin D, it’s quite reasonable to consider a vitamin D supplement. The recommended dietary allowance of vitamin D is 600-800 IU/daily, but during this period, a multivitamin or supplement containing 1000-2000 IU/daily of vitamin D would be reasonable.

We are in the process of planning a randomized clinical trial of vitamin D supplementation in moderate to high doses to see whether it has a role in the risk of developing COVID-19 infections and also in reducing the severity of disease and improving clinical outcomes.

In the meantime, it’s important to encourage measures that will, on a population-wide basis, reduce the risk for vitamin D deficiency.