According to a new study out of Tel Aviv University in Israel, adults with asthma who have a vitamin D deficiency may be a lot more likely to suffer asthma attacks. Raising vitamin D levels, therefore, could help control those flare-ups.
This wasn’t the first study to report an association between vitamin D deficiency and asthma severity. In 2012, researchers from the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in Boston found that asthmatic children who had low vitamin D levels experienced poorer lung function, though the authors of this latest study say the previous research suggesting the association was conflicting.
The Israeli researchers studied more than 300,000 people whose vitamin D blood levels had been recorded, finding no association with low vitamin D with an initial diagnosis of asthma, but an inadequate level was significantly associated with the number and severity of attacks in the 21,237 people in the group who’d been diagnosed with asthma.
Results of the analysis, which was published in the journal Allergy on October 3, 2014, revealed that asthmatics who had low vitamin D levels were 25% more likely to have an asthma attack than those whose vitamin D levels were normal. The findings remained consistent even after the research team accounted for other risk factors for asthma, like smoking, obesity and co-existing chronic illnesses.
Lead author of the study, Dr. Ronit Confino-Cohen, a senior lecturer at Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba, Israel, noted, “I think that if a patient has had good treatment for asthma and is still not controlled, maybe he should be checked for his vitamin D levels before adding on more medications,” adding, “Maybe supplementation would do the job.”
-The Alternative Daily
Sources:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/low-vitamin-d-tied-to-asthma-attacks/?ref=health&_r=0
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247836.php
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/all.12508/abstract
