Vitamin D newsletter..Seizures and pre-eclampsia reduced!
Correction of vitamin D deficiency could help control seizures in epilepsy, according to a recently published study by a group of researchers in Hungary.
Lead investigator András Holló and company measured baseline levels of vitamin D in 13 subjects. Ten of the subjects had localization-related epilepsy, two had Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and one subject was diagnosed with idiopathic generalized epilepsy. The subjects' ages ranged between 19-60 years and had epilepsy from 10 to 42 years. Median serum levels at baseline were 11.8 ng/ml, ranging from less than 4 ng/ml to 34.2 ng/ml. Eight of the patients had levels less than 12 ng/ml.
The investigators corrected deficiency in all 13 subjects by administering a one-time 40,000-200,000 IU dose of vitamin D3 to treat deficiency, and then administering a 2,000-2,600 IU daily dose of vitamin D3 for 3 months. The aim of treatment was to raise levels above 30 ng/ml. After a three month follow-up, the median 25(OH)D level was 38 ng/ml, ranging from 23.3-45 ng/ml.
The authors offered no mechanistic explanation for the results. They did point out that vitamin D receptors and enzyme activators are present in the brain. In the patient who had a level lower than 4 ng/ml and 450 seizures in three months, you can't help but speculate that low serum calcium may have played a role in that subject's seizure frequency.
Study limitations include small number of patients and lack of a placebo to compare to. This study certainly warrants a randomized controlled trial, and it also highlights the importance of correcting vitamin D deficiency in epilepsy patients. There is no harm in treating vitamin D deficiency, and this pilot study shows that epilepsy patients could be much better off with a simple maintenance dose of vitamin D.
The Vitamin D Council recommends a maintenance dose of 5,000 IU/day for adults and 1,000 IU/day for every 25lbs of body weight in children to sustain vitamin D sufficiency.
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This is real good news seeing as this is the biggest killer of men!
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A radical change in diet.
For years I have been reading about diet and supplements in the hope of making my old age a little better and less painful. I keep coming across people who advocate a neolithic diet. A diet that our ancestors ate. A diet we no longer eat. It all makes sense if you think of what was available for them to eat and they prospered on that diet. So today we eat a processed "food" that lacks the great majority of those nutrients that our ancestors ate. A food that may taste good but health wise the nation does not do well on!
PS...For those of you who watched the video, you are wondering where is the vitamin D! It is in the organs of the range feed animals. Our ancestors ate the entire animal. It was just a matter of survival.
Black women tend to have higher amounts of breast cancer and aggressive breast cancer. Why? Because their vitamin D levels are lower than white women. Just a fact that the darker the skin the less vitamin D absorbed in a given time period.
Click on the study and check it out for yourself.
Well, I have been away on a trip and just got back. Costa Rica was a lot of fun with wonderful people and a very warm climate. I mention this because I have not blogged recently and I can use it as a tool to make a point or two.
So after a five hour trip to Costa Rica I go out on the beach and spend 20 minutes there to get my dose of Vitamin D. Did I get the 10,000 iu that everyone says I should receive in that time or would another person receive that much? A lot of factors here which includes age ( greatly reduced vitamin D absorption when aged sixty or more), color of skin ( greatly reduced if not white and you are brown or black skinned), if you are tanned ( greatly decreased depending on the amount of tanning), what is the amount of skin exposed ( obviously a bikini is going to expose more skin that a suit covering over half the body), the angle of the sun ( no vitamin D if your shadow is longer than your height) and the new one that I just found out about. Soap!
What happens is the vitamin D is produced in the skin and deposited in the oil on the skin. So, if you sun bath or go to a tanning parlor then go home and take a shower you just washed off the vitamin D. It takes 48 hours for the vitamin D to be absorbed by your system from the oil. So if you take a shower use only water and if you do use soap wash only unexposed areas of your body to sunlight. Arm pits and groin for example would be fine.
I might point out that our ancestors a million years ago did not have soap. Such a good thing, soap, but it has a down side. Just another example of diseases caused by the improvements of "civilization".