A new study suggests that vitamin D may help people with diseased hearts.
A trial on 163 heart failure patients found supplements of vitamin D, which is made in the skin when exposed to sunlight, improved their hearts’ ability to pump blood around the body.
The Leeds Teaching Hospitals team, who presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology, described the results as “stunning”.
Vitamin D is vital for healthy bones and teeth and may have important health benefits throughout the body but many people are deficient.
The average age of people in the study was 70 and like many people that age they had low levels of vitamin D even in summer.
Patients were given either a 100 microgram vitamin D tablet or a sugar pill placebo each day for a year.
Researchers measured the impact on heart failure – a condition in which the heart becomes too weak to pump blood properly.
The key measure was the ejection fraction, the amount of blood pumped out of the chambers of the heart with each beat.
In a healthy adult the figure is between 60% and 70%, but only a quarter of the blood in the heart was being successfully pumped out in the heart failure patients.
In those taking the vitamin pills, the ejection fraction increased from 26% to 34%.
The study also showed the patients hearts became smaller – a suggestion they are becoming more powerful and efficient.
It is also not clear exactly how vitamin D is improving heart function, but it is thought every cell in the body responds to the vitamin.
Most vitamin D comes from sunlight, although it is also found in oily fish, eggs and is added to some foods such as breakfast cereals.
A new study suggests that older people who have a severe vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of developing dementia.
UK researchers, writing in Neurology, looked at about 1,650 people aged over 65.
This is not the first study to suggest a link – but its authors say it is the largest and most robust.
However, experts say it is still too early to say elderly people should take vitamin D as a preventative treatment.
Vitamin D comes from foods – such as oily fish, supplements and exposing skin to sunlight.
Older people who have a severe vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of developing dementia
However older people’s skin can be less efficient at converting sunlight into Vitamin D, making them more likely to be deficient and reliant on other sources.
The international team of researchers, led by Dr. David Llewellyn at the University of Exeter Medical School, followed people for six years.
All were free from dementia, cardiovascular disease and stroke at the start of the study.
At the end of the study they found the 1,169 with good levels of vitamin D had a one in 10 chance of developing dementia. Seventy were severely deficient – and they had around a one in five risk of dementia.
Dr. David Llewellyn said: “We expected to find an association between low vitamin D levels and the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but the results were surprising – we actually found that the association was twice as strong as we anticipated.”
He said further research was needed to establish if eating vitamin D rich foods such as oily fish – or taking vitamin D supplements – could “delay or even prevent” the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
However, Dr. David Llewellyn added: “We need to be cautious at this early stage and our latest results do not demonstrate that low vitamin D levels cause dementia.
“That said, our findings are very encouraging, and even if a small number of people could benefit, this would have enormous public health implications given the devastating and costly nature of dementia.”
