Many Parkinson's Patients Have Low Vitamin D Levels
Lee Swanson, President Swanson Vitamins
February 2009
People with Parkinson's disease are more likely to be vitamin D deficient than healthy adults of the same age or patients with Alzheimer's disease.
According to a study of 300 people from the Southeast United States, 55% of patients with Parkinson's disease had insufficient levels of vitamin D, compared to 36% and 41% for healthy people and patients with Alzheimer's disease.
The study highlights the need to investigate if low vitamin D levels may contribute to the risk of developing Parkinson's disease, researchers wrote in Archives of Neurology.
If a potential causal link is determined, the next step would be to establish whether correction of vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency will improve motor or non-motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease," wrote the authors, led by Marian Evatt from Emory University School of Medicine.
Vitamin D refers to two biologically inactive precursors—D3, also known as cholecalciferol, and D2, also known as ergocalciferol. Both D3 and D2 precursors are hydroxylated in the liver and kidneys to form 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D), the non-active"storage" form, and 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25(OH)2D), the biologically active form that is tightly controlled by the body.
Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency can lead to osteopenia, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, fractures, common cancers, autoimmune diseases, infectious diseases and cardiovascular diseases. Insufficiency is typically defined as blood levels of 25(OD)D lower than 30 ng/ml.
Evatt and co-workers examined the 25(OH)D levels in 100 patients with Parkinson's disease, 97 Alzheimer's disease patients and 99 healthy individuals.
They found that the average vitamin D levels concentration in the group with Parkinson's disease was 31.9 ng/ml—considerably lower than the average levels of 34.8 and 37 ng/ml in the Alzheimer's disease and healthy groups, respectively.
Moreover, a higher proportion of the Parkinson's group was vitamin D deficient, compared to the Alzheimer's group or the healthy group (23% versus 18% and 10%, respectively).
"We found that vitamin D insufficiency may have a unique association with Parkinson's, which is intriguing and warrants further investigation," Evatt said.
Archives of Neurology 65(10): 1348-1352, 2008
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