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Calgary, Alberta – Everyone needs vitamin D to absorb calcium and build healthy, strong bones, but are people doing too much with vitamin D supplements? This is the question raised by researchers at the University of Calgary who say that too much vitamin D can affect bone health.
It only takes 10 to 15 minutes in the sun to wear a swimsuit so that our body produces all the vitamin D we need for the day. However, many people living in areas with limited access to sunlight during the winter months, such as Canada, end up taking vitamin D supplements daily to take their daily dose.
Although it is not usually a bad idea to take vitamin D supplements, there are often contradictory guidelines on the amount of vitamin D that a person should ingest daily. In addition, the researchers speculated that some Canadians might engage in 20 times the amount of vitamin D that their bodies need because they are dealing with a variety of health problems that could be linked to a lack of vitamin D.
All of these factors have led the research team to ask themselves the question: how much vitamin D is it too much?
"Although vitamin D may play a role in the regulation of many body systems, it is the skeleton that is most clearly affected by vitamin D deficiency," says Dr. David Hanley, one of leading researchers in the study, in a press release. "Health Canada's current recommendations have been established to prevent bone diseases caused by vitamin D deficiency for the vast majority of healthy Canadians. But it was more difficult to clearly establish the optimal dose of vitamin D. In designing this study, it remained to be determined whether it was more advantageous to take a higher dose. "
After a three-year study, the researchers concluded that taking high doses of vitamin D had no beneficial effect on health. A total of 300 volunteers aged 55 to 70 years were analyzed. The hypothesis of the research team was D would result in stronger and denser bones among the participants. The volunteers were divided into three groups; one group received 400 IU (international units) of vitamin D per day, the second group received 4,000 IU daily and the third group received 10,000 IU per day.
For reference, Health Canada recommends that Canadian adults under 70 years of age consume approximately 600 IU of vitamin D per day, while Osteoporosis Canada recommends that Canadian adults who develop osteoporosis take up 39 to 2,000 IU per day.
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Resistance and bone density of each volunteer were measured using traditional double radiography (DXA) as well as a new state-of-the-art tomography device called XtremeCT. This new device allowed researchers to examine participants' bones in more detail than one might have imagined a few years ago. Each volunteer was scanned at the beginning of the study and again after 6, 12, 24 and 36 months. Vitamin D and calcium levels were also measured with the help of blood and urine samples collected during the study.
The researchers took the data from the traditional X-ray and XtremeCT devices and calculated two different versions of each participant's bone mineral density (BMD). BMD is the amount of calcium and other minerals present in a particular bone segment.
With age, it is normal for humans to lose some bone density and, according to traditional dual x-ray findings, all three treatment groups showed a progressive decrease in BMD over the three years. However, the more advanced Xtreme CT device found much more pronounced differences in BMD loss between the three dosage groups.
According to XtremeCT readings, volunteers in the 400 IU group lost 1.4% of their BMD over three years, the 4,000 IU group lost 2.6% and the 10,000 IU group lost 3.6%. These results contrasted directly with the researchers' expectations. higher doses of vitamin D appeared to cause a decrease in bone density, not an increase.
"We were not surprised that the use of DXA reveals no difference between the treatment groups, whereas with XtremeCT, the latest bone imaging technology, we observed dose-dependent changes in during the three years. However, we were surprised to find that instead of bone gain with higher doses, the highest dose group lost bones the fastest, "says Professor Steve Boyd, one of the leading researchers in the study. 'study. "This loss of bone mass with 10,000 IU per day is not enough to risk a fracture over a period of three years, but our results suggest that for healthy adults, the doses of vitamin D recommended at doses recommended by Osteoporosis Canada adequate for bone health. "
The researchers also noted that volunteers in the 4,000 and 10,000 IU groups were at high risk of developing hypercalciuria or high levels of calcium in the urine. Hypercalciuria is often associated with the development of kidney stones.
"What we see in this study is that high doses of vitamin D bring no benefit to the skeleton," concludes co-author Dr. Emma Billington. "For healthy adults, 400 IU a day is a reasonable dose. Doses of 4000 IU or more are not recommended for the majority of individuals. "
The study is published in Journal of the American Medical Association.
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