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Very sick patients have lower vitamin D levels

Category: Vitamin D Deficiency-Diagnosis and Treatment

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.