Do you know your vitamin D level? I have no idea if you might have read the book on vitamin D, but here's a quote from pages 27–29, that you might find interesting.:
One of the oldest autoimmune diseases is rheumatoid arthritis.
The well-known Nurses Health Study, which began several decades ago, showed that women who lived in locations with higher ultraviolet B levels were significantly less likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis than women who lived in areas with lower average ultraviolet B levels. But a later study showed that after about the year 1980, that advantage no longer existed. Researchers concluded that the change was probably due to increasing use of sunscreen, resulting in less vitamin D being produced as a result of sun exposure.6 In addition to showing that less sun exposure resulted in a higher risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis, these studies also showed that with less sun exposure, the disease began to develop at a much younger age, on the average.
Another study compared serum vitamin D levels of fifty-four rheumatoid arthritis patients in southern Europe (Italy) and 64 rheumatoid arthritis patients in northern Europe (Estonia) with serum vitamin D levels of normal healthy controls in each respective country.7 The results showed that serum levels of vitamin D varied significantly with the seasons for all groups, but were consistently significantly higher in both winter and summer in Italian residents, compared with Estonian residents. Estonian patients had significantly lower average serum vitamin D levels, compared with Italian patients, and their vitamin D level varied with the seasons. Clinical symptoms for RA were more severe as vitamin D blood levels decreased, and this was true for patients in both northern and southern areas of Europe.
One of the more interesting findings of the study was that during the summer, increasing blood levels of vitamin D strongly correlated with decreasing disease activity levels of RA in Italian patients (but not in Estonian patients). And during the winter, decreasing blood levels of vitamin D strongly correlated with increasing disease activity levels of RA in Estonian patients (but not in Italian patients).
The authors of the study concluded that in general, blood levels of vitamin D were significantly lower in RA patients from North Europe when compared with RA patients from South Europe, and they varied with summer and winter, for both locations. But the most important finding for our purposes in this book, was that blood levels of vitamin D show a significant inverse correlation with RA disease activity levels in RA patients from both North and South Europe. Simply put, the higher the blood level of vitamin D, the lower the severity of RA symptoms. And conversely, the lower the blood level of vitamin D, the more severe the RA symptoms.
Here are the references cited in that quote:
6. Walsh, N. (2013, February 4). Arthritis: Sun's rays may cut risk in women. [Web log message]. Retrieved from
http://www.medpagetoday.com/Rheumatolog ... itis/37187
7. Cutolo, M., Otsa, K., Laas, K., Yprus, M., Lehtme, R., Secchi, M. E., . . . Seriolo, B. (2006). Circannual vitamin d serum levels and disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis: Northern versus Southern Europe. Clinical and Experimental Rheumatology, 24(6), 702–704. Retrieved from
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17207389
And you might be interested in this quote from pages 62–63:
So I'll pose an academic question here, "Could this possibly be the primary mechanism by which corticosteroids work to suppress inflammation?"
Corticosteroids are widely prescribed to treat IBDs, rheumatoid arthritis, and other autoimmune diseases and inflammation-driven issues. It was previously thought that corticosteroids are effective for controlling inflammation because they suppress mast cell numbers and mast cell degranulation. But now we know that this is the domain of vitamin D and the vitamin D receptors.
Could it be that a synergistic effect with vitamin D might be the sole reason why corticosteroids are so effective at reducing inflammation? Hopefully, a research group somewhere in the world will be curious enough (and able to find the necessary funding) to explore this and either verify it or disprove it. But in the meantime, my gut feeling is that corticosteroids probably suppress inflammation by expressing VDRs, thus exploiting vitamin D to actually provide the mechanism by which the inflammation is suppressed.
My position is supported by the fact that it is well known that corticosteroids deplete supplies of vitamin D in the body.23 Obviously if corticosteroids promote the expression of VDRs, then this action would expedite increased utilization of available supples of vitamin D, resulting in depleted supples as the vitamin D is used to suppress the inflammation.
And here is reference 23 from that quote:
23. Staff. (2014). Drugs that deplete: Vitamin D. University of Maryland Medical Center. [Web log message]. Retrieved from
https://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/s ... -vitamin-d
Of course a discussion of published research data precedes this second quote, and provides the evidence upon which my observation in that quote is based.
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