PROTECTIVE LINK BETWEEN VITAMIN D AND COVID 19

 

This information was sent to me this morning from Mary Carter, one of our conservative ladies.  Mary received this information from Dr. B Todd Granger, her physician, regarding the  protective role vitamin D may play with  Covid-19.  Please share with others .   Nancy  

———- Forwarded message ———
From: <reminders@drchrono.com>
Date: Tue, May 12, 2020, 6:09 PM
Subject: Dr. B. Todd Granger: Transcript of Dr. Manson’s video presentation

Dear Mary Carter,

I’ve discovered that the link opens up Dr. Manson’s video presentation on vitamin D and protection against COVID-19 only if you have an account with Medscape. Here is the transcript of her presentation in its entirety. My apologies for the odd formatting that occurred in copying and pasting the transcript.

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.
Thank you so much for your attention. This is JoAnn Manson. Stay safe.
Dr
JoAnn Manson is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and
chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women’s
Hospital, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Regards,
Dr. B. Todd Granger

 

Share

Leave a Reply

Search All Posts
Categories