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0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Nov 17, 2009 | by Carrie A. Moore Deseret News

Many Americans have become so effective at covering themselves from the sun that they don’t get enough vitamin D, which may be putting them at increased risk not only for cardiovascular disease but for depression.

That’s the finding of a new study of more than 27,000 patients tracked by researchers at Intermountain Medical Center, who found that healthy levels of vitamin D contribute to a strong and healthy heart.

They also found that inadequate vitamin D levels may significantly increase the risk of stroke, heart disease and death – - even among those who’ve never had heart disease.

The study’s findings were presented Monday at the American Heart Association’s annual scientific conference in Orlando, Fla.

Researchers also found a lack of vitamin D may contribute to depression in both men and women.

“This was a unique study because the association between vitamin D deficiency and cardiovascular disease has not been well- established,” said Dr. Brent Muhlestein, director of cardiovascular research of the Heart Institute at IMC and a lead researcher on the study.

“Its conclusions about how we can prevent disease and provide treatment may ultimately help us save more lives.”

Muhlestein said the research team began thinking about recent vitamin D studies in conjunction with the fact that kidney-failure patients usually die of heart disease or heart attacks, rather than kidney failure.

Those patients also “don’t make enough vitamin D,” so when doctors were able to supplement the kidney patients with the vitamin, “they’re less likely to die of heart attacks.”

Researchers social anxiety treatment working on a variety of studies with vitamin D had discovered that “it’s a co-factor in more than 200 different processes in the body,” including glucose metabolism, as well as being a component of managing blood pressure and in the body’s inflammatory response. “All three of those have been found to be critically linked to heart disease,” he said.

“We’re not the first to have ever looked at this, but I think this is the largest general-population study” on the topic, he added.

While researchers have documented the association between vitamin D deficiency and heart disease, they still don’t know whether it’s a “cause-and-effect” relationship at this point, he said.

Dr. Heidi May, one of the study’s co-authors, said there is also a strong association between vitamin D deficiency and the risk of developing depression. From the larger database, researchers examined those who were low on the vitamin who also had cardiovascular disease and found that 8,600 of them had about a 40 percent higher risk for depression.

“We didn’t quantify how it happens, but you’ve heard of seasonal affective disorder in places where they don’t see the sun a lot, so I think common sense would say it might be because you get a lot of vitamin D from the sun. But we didn’t get into the pathophysiology,” she said.

The research team followed 27,686 patients who were ages 50 or older with no prior history of cardiovascular disease who had their blood vitamin D levels tested during routine medical care. The patients were divided into three groups based on their vitamin D levels: normal (over 30 nanograms per milliliter), low (15-30 ng/ ml), or very low (less than 15 ng/ml).

Researchers then followed the patients to see if they developed some form of heart disease and found those with very low levels were 77 percent more likely to die, 45 percent more likely to develop coronary-artery disease and 78 percent were more likely to have a stroke than patients with normal vitamin D levels.

Patients with very low levels of vitamin D were also twice as likely to develop heart failure than those with normal levels.

Muhlestein called vitamin D deficiency “an epidemic” based on the thousands of patients whose tests were part of the study, which showed 10,000 were at normal levels, but 13,000 were low and 4,500 were very low.

“That means about two-thirds are deficient,” he said, adding he tested his own level and found it to be very low.

Most people think milk is the best source, but “you don’t get much out of milk, per se, except that it’s fortified. The best source is actually in a plantliver oil, which is available over the counter in 1,000 unit or 2,000 unit pills