Is Vitamin D Deficiency Affecting your Patient's Health?

About Vitamin D

Dietary vitamin D is actually a precursor hormone — the building block of a powerful steroid hormone in your body called calcitriol. It’s been known for many years that vitamin D is critical to the health of our bones and teeth, but deeper insight into D’s wider role in our health is quite new. Vitamin D works in concert with other nutrients and hormones in your body to support healthy bone renewal — an ongoing process of mineralization and demineralization which, when awry, shows up as rickets in children and osteomalacia (“soft bones”) or osteoporosis (“porous bones”) in adults.

Researchers are discovering that D also promotes normal cell growth and differentiation throughout the body, working as a key factor in maintaining hormonal balance and a healthy immune system. It appears that calcitriol actually becomes part of the physical composition of cells, assisting in the buildup and breakdown of healthy tissue — in other words, regulating the processes that keep you well.

What’s more, evidence from studies tracking the prevalence of disease by geography and nationality shows clear links between vitamin D deficiency and obesity, insulin resistance, heart disease, certain cancers, and depression. Since most of these problems take many years to manifest, vitamin D deficiency has been overlooked by many providers for a very long time.

Your body can’t create vitamin D on its own. Instead, it’s designed to make it through sun exposure. In theory, you can make an ample supply of vitamin D with as little as a couple of hours per week in the sun — provided the UVB rays are strong enough. You can also ingest D through food, especially fatty fish like wild–harvested salmon. Many foods are now fortified with Vitamin D but most of the population are still not receiving sufficient amounts to reverse Vitamin D deciciency and insufficiency.

Vitamin D requirements

The growing awareness of how much our bodies rely on vitamin D has raised concern that the dietary recommended daily intake values (DRI’s) may prove to be obsolete — 200 IU (International Units) a day for adults 19–50 years old, 400 IU for those 51–70, and 600 IU for those over 70. Experts now agree that the DRI’s for vitamin D are way too low, particularly for people who don’t get sufficient sun exposure.

Some studies have shown that adults need 3000–5000 IU per day, and others indicate healthy adults can readily metabolize up to 10,000 IU vitamin D per day without harmful side effects. The European Union’s Scientific Committee on Food lists 2000 IU per day as the safety cut-off, as does the US Food and Nutrition Board. But the latest science strongly suggests most adults should be taking more. Unless you have testing and monitoring, there is wisdom in keeping the safe upper intake at 2000 IU per day. On balance, the point here is that vitamin D at doses far higher than today’s daily intake values (DRI’s) appears to be safe, to promote optimal health, to reduce the risk of many serious diseases, and even to speed healing for serious health concerns.

Assessing your Patients Vitamin D Sufficiency at Shiel Medical Laboratory

Serum concentration of 25(OH)D is the accepted indicator of vitamin D status. A normal Vitamin D test result for both children and adults is 30 ng/mL to 100ng/mL. Less than 10 ng/mL is considered deficient, 10 ng/mL to 30 ng/mL is considered insufficient, above 100 ng/mL indicates possible toxicity, and the optimal level is believed to be at least 50 ng/mL.

Shiel Medical Laboratory offers 2 Vitamin D Tests

Test # 661 – Vitamin D (25 Hydroxy), used for general screening and follow up testing of patients identified with D deficiency

Test # 649 – Vitamin D, 1,25-Dihydroxy, ordered If calcium is high or the patient has a disease that might produce excess amounts of Vitamin D, such as sarcoidosis or some forms of lymphoma.

Shiel Medical Laboratory - (800) 553-0873 – www.shiel.com