UIC Researchers Test Effects of Vitamin D on Asthma Severity
[Writer] This is research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago. Today, Jerry Krishnan, professor of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine talks about his clinical study on the effect of Vitamin D on asthma severity.
Here’s Doctor Krishnan:
[Krishnan] Vitamin D is also one of those things that you tend to get more of if you eat or drink dairy products.
So depending on your diet and depending on your exposure to sunlight you may not have enough Vitamin D in your body. We all know of course that vitamin D is important for the bones –in fact children with low vitamin D levels tend to get something called rickets. And we’ve long solved that problem by making sure there’s enough vitamin D in our diet through milk and other sources.
But what we’re now starting to understand is that vitamin D may be important for other parts of your body as well, including lung development. And in people with asthma there are epidemiological studies that show an association with between low vitamin D levels, lower lung function and your risk of having asthma attacks.
So patients with asthma who have low vitamin D levels tend to have worse lung function and tend to have more asthma attacks.
The purpose of this study is to understand if we were to supplement a person’s vitamin D when they have low vitamin D to begin with, so giving vitamin D back if you will. Whether the correction of vitamin D levels allows your asthma to get better and perhaps have fewer asthma attacks.
And the holy grail, of course is that whether by taking vitamin D whether you may be able to get away with less asthma medicines. So it may be that improving your asthma control may be as simple as taking a vitamin a day.
And the purpose of this study of course is to find out if in fact taking vitamin D helps your asthma get better.
And I do want to caution our audience to recognize of course that while it may be true that giving vitamin D helps your asthma, it may also be true that giving vitamin D doesn’t help your asthma. And that’s the purpose of doing a study.
So people shouldn’t take this message and this enthusiasm to mean that you should go right out to your drugstore and take more vitamin D.
We do know that taking excess vitamin D can have harms as well. It can lead to, for example, kidney stones and other things.
So I think if you’re interested in learning about vitamin D and if you’re interested in seeing if low vitamin D is the reason your asthma doesn’t get better, than really you should enroll in one of our studies so you can be in a controlled environment in which we can learn better whether vitamin D helps your asthma
[Writer] Dr. Jerry Krishnan is a professor in pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine.
For more information about this research, go to www.today.uic.edu, click on “news releases,” and look for the release dated Nov. 28, 2011.
This has been research news from U-I-C – the University of Illinois at Chicago.
