How Sunlight Can Save Your Life

Diseases Caused By Vitamin D Deficiency
By Oliver Gillie The Independent - UK 1-27-4

Experts hotly debate which diseases may truly be caused by vitamin D deficiency. Nevertheless the extent of the evidence and its consistency makes a powerful case for D-deficiency being an important cause of over a dozen chronic diseases and almost as many cancers. Other important factors such as obesity, lack of exercise, or a diet containing too many calories, are also known to increase the risk of many of these diseases. But both obesity and lack of exercise are linked with D-deficiency and so the evidence is confused. Vitamin D, is stored in fat and becomes 'lost' in obese people, while people who take exercise often spend more time outdoors in the sun.

Nervous system diseases

Last year Professor John McGrath and others at the University of Queensland found that pregnant rats deprived of vitamin D give birth to baby rats with serious brain abnormalities. This work will eventually be seen to be as important as the discovery that folic acid deficiency during pregnancy causes severe spinal deformities (spina bifida) in offspring, or that thalidomide given to pregnant animals causes abnormalities of the limbs. The importance of their article published in Neuroscience (volume 118, pp641-653) has not yet been appreciated but it provides a means of understanding several neurological diseases which have puzzled doctors for more than a century.

Multiple sclerosis (MS), Schizophrenia, and Parkinson's disease - people with these diseases are more likely to have winter or spring birthdays. MS and Parkinson's diseases are more common in northern countries or states of America. People with MS have worse symptoms in winter and brain scans show an increase in damage to the brain of MS people in winter. Supplements of vitamin D given to babies may prevent MS and schizophrenia. A very severe form of Parkinson's disease occurs in people with dark skin living in the UK.

Alzheimer's disease and Amyotropic lateral sclerosis (motor neurone disease) are believed by some neurologists to be similar in the way they develop to Parkinson's disease but affecting different parts of the brain or nervous system. These diseases are several times more common in black people living in United States than in black people living in traditional societies in the Tropics. In northern countries there are more births of these two diseases in winter.

Autism - people with autism have winter birthdays more often than would be expected. The cause of the disease is a mystery, but increased winter birthdays could be an important clue suggesting that vitamin D deficiency in pregnancy is a cause, at least in a proportion of cases.

Autoimmune diseases

These are diseases in which the body is attacked by its own immune system. Such attacks are generally thought to be triggered by infection, but deficiency of vitamin D causing abnormal proliferation of cells and changes in the immune system may be a key factor. There are many of these diseases and some are quite rare. Only a few have been studied in depth.

Diabetes type 1 - a classic autoimmune disease. It is more common in northern countries and an increase in winter birthdays have been found in some places. Vitamin D supplements in pregnancy or first year of life protects against the disease and vitamin D may also delay progress of the disease after it has begun to cause problems.

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