Vitamin Information Center

(NaturalNews) Women who do not get enough vitamin D while pregnant place their children at increased risk for tooth enamel defects and early childhood tooth decay, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Manitoba, Canada, and presented at the General Session of the International Association for Dental Research in Toronto.

Researchers measured the vitamin D blood levels of 206 women in the second trimester of pregnancy. Only 10.5 percent had sufficient levels. Of 135 infants studied, 21.6 percent suffered from enamel defects, and 33.6 percent suffered from early childhood tooth decay.

While low maternal vitamin D levels were correlated with enamel defects, this correlation did not reach statistical significance. Insufficient maternal vitamin D was also correlated with higher levels of early childhood tooth decay, a relationship that was found to be statistically significant. The researchers also found that infants who had enamel defects were more likely to go on to have early childhood tooth decay than children with healthier enamel.

The study was funded by Dairy Farmers of Canada, the Dentistry Canada Fund, the Manitoba Institute of Child Health, the Manitoba Medical Service Foundation and the University of Manitoba. The researchers warned that because 90 percent of study participants were urban aboriginal women, caution should be used in generalizing the study’s results.

Vitamin D is naturally produced by the body upon exposure to sunlight. It is essential in helping the body absorb calcium, a critical component of healthy bones and teeth. Recent research has also suggested that the vitamin might play critical role in the health of the immune system, and may help prevent not only osteoporosis but also high blood pressure, cancer and certain autoimmune diseases.

The average light-skinned person can get enough vitamin D from 15 minutes of sun on the face and hands each day, while a darker-skinned person needs twice as much. This may not be sufficient for people living in extreme latitudes, however, especially during the winter.

Sources for this story include: www.washingtonpost.com; www.reuters.com.

Increased intake of calcium and vitamin D can help prevent or slow bone loss in men, according to a pair of studies conducted by researchers from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

An estimated 75 million women and men in the United States, Europe and Japan suffer from osteoporosis, a disease in which bones become thin and brittle.

Prior research has demonstrated that both calcium and vitamin D are important for the bone health of women, who are four times more likely to develop osteoporosis than men. In a 2006 study published in the journal Bone, scientists also found that older men who drank fortified milk daily experienced a 1.8 percent increase in the bone mineral density of their hip bones and a 1.5 percent increase in the density of their wrist bones.

The fortified milk contained 500 milligrams of calcium and 400 IU of vitamin D3, as well as other vitamins and minerals. The researchers noted that because the participants were given fortified milk instead of individual vitamin supplements, it was not possible to determine whether the bone density increase came from the calcium, the vitamin D, both, or some combination of those nutrients with others found in the milk.

The researchers also noted that while calcium intake was higher in participants who drank fortified milk than in control participants, this difference was not statistically significant.

In a more recent study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers followed up with 109 of the original study participants 18 months after that study’s conclusion. During that time, the participants had not been provided with fortified milk, but the bone-density improvements from the first study were still apparent.

The researchers suggested that supplementation of milk with calcium and vitamin D3, as is done in Canada, could lead to long-term bone health benefits for older men.

Vitamin D is the key to preventing rickets and osteoporosis, but Rockefeller University scientists suspect it may also play a role in heading off atherosclerosis in people with chronic kidney disease. In a new clinical study, investigators at The Rockefeller University Hospital are examining patients with moderately reduced kidney function to investigate the effect of vitamin D therapy on endotoxemia, a condition that is common among those with renal disease and is widely viewed as a contributor to heart disease. The study, led by Instructor in Clinical Investigation Manish Ponda, is partially funded by a $25,000 grant from the Center for Clinical and Translational Science.

The high rate of atherosclerosis among patients with kidney disease is well documented but little understood by medical experts. Endotoxins, products of the natural breakdown process of bacteria, are a hot topic of clinical investigation with regard to both heart and kidney disease. “The number one killer among people with kidney disease is heart disease, just like in the rest of the population, except that in people with kidney disease, the heart disease exhibits an accelerated course,” says Ponda, a member of Jan Breslow’s Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism at Rockefeller. The research is an extension of earlier clinical work by Ponda that showed a high incidence of vitamin D deficiency among early-stage kidney disease patients.

Study participants — males and postmenopausal females between ages 50 and 80 with stage three chronic kidney disease and vitamin D deficiency — will be provided with thrice-weekly doses of vitamin D3, also known as cholecalciferol, the form of vitamin D produced by the body in response to sunlight. Participants will make three outpatient visits at intervals of four weeks each to The Rockefeller University Hospital, where investigators test for levels of endotoxins in response to vitamin D repletion.

The dose of vitamin D prescribed for the study — 30,000 international units per week — equals more than 20 times the intake recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture and approximately 10 times the amount in an average multivitamin supplement. The dosage is designated to safely reverse vitamin D deficiency.

If Ponda’s hypothesis — that vitamin D repletion will be accompanied by decreases in blood endotoxin levels — holds true, a larger, more-extensive, “progression” study will follow, to chart the connection over longer periods of treatment and in later stages of renal disease. “Kidney disease puts a person at significantly higher risk for cardiovascular disease, but it is often asymptomatic even as late as stage three,” says Ponda. “The more definitively we can characterize renal disease, the closer we are to effectively treating both it and its comorbid conditions.”

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study indicates that multivitamins and vitamin C top the list of dietary supplements used by US adolescents, which is “reassuring” given the relative lack of health risks associated with them, researchers say.

But adolescents in the study who used prescription medications were also more likely to use dietary supplements, and doctors and pharmacists should be sure to ask their young patients about supplements to avoid the possibility of harmful interactions, Dr. Paula Gardiner of Boston University Medical School and her colleagues conclude.

Gardiner and her team reviewed data from the 1999-2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys for 11- to 19-year-olds to investigate how common supplement use is among adolescents and factors associated with using vitamins, herbal medicines, minerals and other products.

Twenty-seven percent of the adolescents surveyed said they had used a dietary supplement in the past month, the researchers found. Sixteen percent used multivitamins, while 6 percent said they took vitamin C. Just 4 percent used non-vitamin mineral supplements, including 2 percent who said they used supplements to help them lose weight or enhance sports performance.

Non-Hispanic whites were most likely to be using dietary supplements, while prescription medication users were 37 percent more likely than those not taking prescribed drugs to use dietary supplements. Study participants who said they were in fair or poor health were 41 percent less likely to take supplements than their peers who considered themselves to be in better health. And adolescents who reported having chronic headaches were 25 percent more likely to use dietary supplements.

Obese individuals were 51 percent more likely to be using non-vitamin or mineral herbal supplements, the researchers found, as were older teens.

“To better understand use among culturally diverse groups and those with different clinical conditions, future studies should include a broader range of dietary supplements (such as those used in folk remedies, foods and medicinal teas) and ask about common health conditions,” the researchers conclude.

“Additional studies are needed to determine the impact of dietary supplement use on health care use, health status, and quality of life,” they add.

SOURCE: BMC - Complementary and Alternative Medicine, published online March 31, 2008.