ADVERTISING: Advertorial — Vitamin D is an essential vitamin that may be more vital than we realize

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin that helps your body absorb calcium and phosphorus. It is also an essential nutrient for your immune health. With sun exposure, the body has the ability to produce Vitamin D from the skin but for some people they do not produce enough due to many factors including genetic predisposition, demographics, etc. In addition, it is found that 95% of Americans do not consume enough Vitamin D from their diet.

New research is beginning to look into the benefits of Vitamin D and the impact it may have on whether someone exposed to COVID will express symptoms. Study after study are reporting the same thing, low Vitamin D levels may contribute to catching Covid. One new study of more than 190,000 people led by Michael F. Holick, Ph.D., MD, professor of Medicine, Physiology and Biophysics and Molecular Medicine at Boston University Medical Campus found just that.

“We evaluated more than 190,000 blood samples from patients of all ethnicities and ages infected with COVID in all 50 states. We observed that the higher that the patient’s blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D was, up to 55 ng/mL lower was their risk of being infected with the coronavirus," Dr. Holick said.

(https://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm/2020/09/18/low-levels-of-25-hydoxyitamin-d-linked-to-covid-19-risk/)

A prior study by Holick found that having a sufficient amount of vitamin D might also reduce the risk of becoming infected with the coronavirus by 54%. Along with helping reduce the risks associated with the new coronavirus, being vitamin D-sufficient does the same against other viruses that cause upper respiratory tract illnesses, including the flu, according to Holick.

The International Journal of Infectious Disease reviewed 361,934 participants that were selected for an analysis. They came up with three take-a-ways:

• COVID-19-positive patients have a higher incidence of low vitamin D levels than COVID-19-negative patients.

• COVID-19-positive patients have lower vitamin D levels than COVID-19-negative patients.

• Vitamin D supplementation may be beneficial for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

They concluded that after the “systematic review and meta-analysis indicated that low vitamin D status might be associated with an increased risk of COVID-19 infection.”

(https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32600-X/fulltext)

A study performed at Department of Internal Medicine, University of Genova confirmed “that 25OH-vitamin D serum deficiency is associated with more severe lung involvement, longer disease duration and risk of death, in elderly COVID-19 patients. The detection of low vitamin D levels also in younger COVID-19 patients with less comorbidities further suggests vitamin D deficiency as crucial risk factor at any age. (2021 Feb. 24;13(3):717)

Another study printed in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 106, Issue 3, March 2021, found “80 percent of 216 COVID-19 patients at the Hospital Universitario Marqués de Valdecilla had vitamin D deficiency, and men had lower vitamin D levels than women.

(https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/106/3/e1343/5934827)

But Dr. Horovitz noted that vitamin D has been a bit tougher to come by, "During lockdown, people were indoors more and so their natural D level was lower than ever," he pointed out. "In people who don't take D, their level is usually low unless they take D as a supplement.

“If you are deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. So I would not mind recommending, and I do it myself, taking vitamin D supplements,” Dr. Anthony Fauci.

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Dr. Wayne M. Fichter Jr. is a chiropractor at Natural Spine Solutions. The business is located at 3913 Schreiber Way in Coeur d’Alene. For more information, please contact us at 208-966-4425.