Cleveland Plain Dealer June 11

[ED ST]

Vitamin D deficiency, heart attack risk linked

Study: gloomy news for cloudy Cleveland
Wednesday, June 11, 2008 Brie Zeltner
Plain Dealer Reporter
Add one more paper to the growing pile of vitamin D studies that conclude that people lacking in the sunshine vitamin could be at risk for serious health problems.
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that men who are deficient in vitamin D had more than double the risk of suffering a heart attack.
This study, released Tuesday, is just the latest to establish a link between the sunshine vitamin and good health - deficiency has been linked to auto-immune conditions like multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis, several types of cancer, and now heart disease.
So, should you run outside and resume '60s-era sun worship?
Probably not.
But most experts agree we're not getting enough vitamin D, and sun and supplements are the only places to get it.
"What this means for people here is huge, because Cleveland is second only to Seattle for gray days per year," said Dr. Tanya Edwards, medical director for the Center for Integrative Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic.
Edwards started checking all of her patients' blood levels about eight months ago and found that about 90 percent of them were vitamin D deficient.
She doesn't recommend an across-the-board level of supplementation, however, because the amount you need may vary depending on your race, your age, and how low your blood levels are to start.
Her advice?
"The prudent thing is for everyone to have their vitamin D level checked and then to be rechecked to make sure they're adequate. Just like 20 years ago when we started saying that everyone should know their cholesterol levels, I think the new mantra should be to know your vitamin D level."
And for patients that aren't at increased risk for skin cancer, she recommends 15 minutes of unprotected sun exposure to the face and arms a day.
Most people can build up adequate stores of vitamin D from moderate sun exposure.
Foods, even fortified milk and oily fish, are generally poor sources of the vitamin (you would have to drink four glasses of milk a day to get to the lower end of the recommended intake).
Science is still a long way from consensus, however.
"We don't have a cause-and-effect relationship here yet," to prove that higher doses of vitamin D prevent these diseases, biochemist Hector DeLuca of the University of Wisconsin told the Los Angeles Times.
But the links are so suggestive "that we have to pay attention to keeping blood levels up where they will protect," he said.
Until the protective effect is proved, he added, "What's wrong with keeping an adequate level of vitamin D in the blood in case it is?"
The most recent study, released in the Archives of Internal Medicine, looked at a group of 18,225 men.
The men gave a blood sample between 1993 and 1995, and were followed for the next 10 years.
The study compared 454 men who had heart attacks with 900 others who did not, looking at blood levels of vitamin D.
After controlling for other variables like high blood pressure, obesity, lipid levels, smoking, and physical activity, the men with blood levels below 15 nanograms per milliliter had twice the risk of heart attack. Men with 15 to 29 nanograms per milliliter also had an increased risk.
Recommendations for blood levels are based on preventing rickets, the childhood bone disease most commonly associated with deficiency.
The recommended daily intake-between 200 and 600 international units - is considered low by most researchers in the field.
Blood levels below 25 or 30 nanograms per milliliter are considered deficient. Studies the past decade indicate that as much as 30 percent of the country's white population is deficient. Half or more of the black and Hispanic population may be deficient, because melanin, the pigment that gives darker skin its color, blocks ultraviolet light penetration.
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
bzeltner@plaind.com, 216-999-4283



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[Ezliving_Jim]

The reporter disconnects on the availability of UVB from lamps. This is an opportunity for a followup story or, at least, a letter to the editor.