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Very sick patients have lower vitamin D levels

Updated: 2009-05-04 22:08:18 CST Category: Vitamin D Deficiency-Diagnosis and Treatment

by Laurent Castellucci

Extremely ill patients have lower levels of vitamin D, and the sicker they are, the lower their levels are, according to researchers in Sydney, Australia.

In a letter that came out in the New England Journal of Medicine, a group of endocrinologists investigated the patients in their ICU and found that 45 percent of them suffered from vitamin D deficiency. When they correlated the vitamin D levels with a disease severity score, there was a direct correspondence between how sick they were and how low their level of vitamin D was.

"Until now, the medical community has thought of vitamin D deficiency as a chronic condition," said Dr Paul Lee, one of the study authors. "Little is known about its acute complications."

The high rate of vitamin D deficiency in sick patients has inspired Lee and his colleagues to take on further studies to see if there is a causal link, and in which direction. Does low vitamin D cause disease, or does disease cause low vitamin D?

"At this stage, we don't know whether vitamin D deficiency is just a marker of ill health, or whether it contributes to disease severity," Lee says. They hope to test whether increasing vitamin D for ICU patients will result in better outcomes.

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