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— The number of reported cases of a novel swine influenza virus has risen to 12 since July, encompassing 5 states, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The virus includes a gene from the human pandemic strain and affects mostly children. The infections in question involve a variant of the A(H3N2) virus that circulates among pigs. It contains a gene from the pandemic 2009 influenza A(H1N1) virus that codes for matrix proteins found in the viral shell. In 3 of the 5 states where the A(H3N2)v virus has surfaced — Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Maine —...

Another day, and another vitamin has failed to live up to all of its hype. This time it’s vitamin D. The reality check is coming from two new research reviews published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The reviews, which looked at hundreds of previous studies of the “sunshine vitamin,” conclude that there’s little evidence that vitamin D protects against cancer or heart disease. They also show that vitamin D doesn’t prevent fractures when it’s taken alone. Pairing vitamin D with extra calcium does appear to help prevent broken bones in the elderly, however. “For many years, the enthusiasm for...

A rare genetic variant which causes reduced levels of vitamin D appears to be directly linked to multiple sclerosis, says an Oxford University study. UK and Canadian scientists identified the mutated gene in 35 parents of a child with MS and, in each case, the child inherited it. Researchers say this adds weight to suggestions of a link between vitamin D deficiency and MS. The study is in Annals of Neurology. Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord). Although the cause of MS is not yet conclusively known, both genetic and...

John J. Cannell, M.D writes that he receives numerous questions from individuals who ask, "My doctor prescribed Drisdol, is that OK?" Drisdol is vitamin D2 in a form that doctors write prescriptions for. Sun exposure does not produce vitamin D2 in the body, the vitamin is produced by plant matter and irradiating fungus. When consumed, numerous metabolic forms of D2 can be traced in the body. According to some studies, vitamin D3, which is produced by the skin, is more powerful, hence more effective at raising blood levels compared with vitamin D2, however, some studies say they are equal. Few...

The Winnipeg streets are silent and black when Joanne Bromilow gropes a weary hand to a glass of water and two turquoise pills on her bedside table. Before her feet hit the floor later that morning, she’ll have taken another kaleidoscopic handful with hues almost as intense and varied as her symptoms:....Bromilow is one of the 75,000 Canadians in the grips of multiple sclerosis. ........ Half a world away in Sydney, Australia, Lynne Berson wakes up in the half-light of early dawn, pads her way to the kitchen to make her kids’ lunches while musing how spoiled she is to...

If it's Monday, it must be bad news about multivitamin day -- or was that Wednesday? No, Wednesday was good news about vitamin D, not so good news about vitamin E -- if you're confused, join the club. The alphabet soup of vitamin studies making headlines in the last few weeks has left more than one head spinning, and most clinicians scrambling for answers. As the dust begins to settle, physicians interviewed by MedPage Today and ABC News agreed on a bit of simple wisdom -- a healthy diet is more important than a fistful of supplements. "I had already...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Despite some research linking low vitamin D levels to heart disease, a new study suggests that lacking D does not increase one's risk of an irregular heartbeat known as atrial fibrillation. > "I think the study was done well," said Dr. Michal Melamed, who studies vitamin D at the Einstein School of Medicine in New York and was not involved in the research. It shows that this one vitamin doesn't have an effect on all heart diseases, which is a good thing, she said. A 2008 study of the same group of Framingham participants found...

A study conducted by VHIO researchers confirms that a lack of vitamin D increases the aggressiveness of colon cancer The indication that vitamin D and its derivatives have a protective effect against various types of cancer is not new. In the field of colon cancer, numerous experimental and epidemiological studies show that vitamin D3 (or cholecalciferol) and some of its derivatives inhibit the growth of cancerous cells. Researchers at the Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), in collaboration with the Alberto Sols Institute of Biomedical Research (CSIC-UAB), have confirmed the pivotal role of vitamin D, specifically its receptor (VDR), in...

Obesity and low vitamin D are linked to risk of cancer and other diseasesSEATTLE – Overweight or obese women with less-than-optimal levels of vitamin D who lose more than 15 percent of their body weight experience significant increases in circulating levels of this fat-soluble nutrient, according to a new study by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. "Since vitamin D is generally lower in persons with obesity, it is possible that low vitamin D could account, in part, for the link between obesity and diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes," said Caitlin Mason, Ph.D., lead author of...

Researchers say their mice study should provide a word of caution to people who believe that excess vitamin D prevents cancerOrlando, Fla. -- In mice models of breast cancer, researchers at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center, found that vitamin D significantly reduced development of estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer both in lean and obese mice, but had no beneficial effect in estrogen receptor-negative (ER-) cancer. In fact, obese mice destined to develop ER- breast cancer were clearly worse off than lean ER- mice if they were given vitamin D in their diet....

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Vitamin D and calcium have been hailed as a possible antidote for cancer, heart disease and more, but a panel of US and Canadian doctors said Tuesday that the duo's only sure benefit is bone health. After reviewing about 1,000 studies on the supposed links between low vitamin D levels and higher risk of serious diseases, the panel concluded that they showed inconsistent results, sometimes due to shoddy research methods. The experts also issued new guidelines -- the first since 1997 -- for North Americans, saying people should take between 700 and 1,300 milligrams of calcium and...

Other factors predominate in summer Vitamin D is somewhat of an unusual "vitamin," because it can be made in the body from sunlight and most foods do not contain vitamin D unless added by fortification. Synthesis of vitamin D in the body requires exposure to ultraviolet light and can be influenced by genetics, skin color, and sun exposure. Reports of greater than expected vitamin D insufficiency coupled with emerging evidence that higher circulating concentrations of this nutrient may protect against cardiovascular disease have prompted a renewed interest in teasing out how environment, genetics, and behavior work independently and coordinately to...

Simple treatment may counteract widespread problem of subnormal vitamin levels in acute-care patientsTreatment with vitamin C rapidly improves the emotional state of acutely hospitalized patients, according to a study carried out by researchers at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital (JGH) and the affiliated Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research (LDI). In a double-blind clinical trial, patients admitted to the JGH were randomly assigned to receive either vitamin C or vitamin D supplements for seven to ten days. Patients administered vitamin C had a rapid and statistically and clinically significant improvement in mood state, but no significant change in mood occurred with...

Supplementation Is Safe and Effective. DR. HEANEY is John A. Creighton University Professor and professor of medicine in the division of endocrinology at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine's Calcium and Related Nutrients Panel of the Food and Nutrition Board, which set the intake recommendations for vitamin D in 1997. He reports no financial disclosures.Widespread supplementation of the adult population with vitamin D is advisable because it restores the conditions under which human physiology evolved, and because it is efficacious and safe.Let's look first at the physiology. Vitamin D is normally made in...

PITTSBURGH, Aug. 25 – Vitamin D may be an effective therapy to treat and even prevent allergy to a common mold that can cause severe complications for patients with cystic fibrosis and asthma, according to researchers from Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Louisiana State University School of Medicine. Results of the study, led by Jay Kolls, M.D., Ph.D., a lung disease researcher at Children's Hospital and professor of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, are published in the September 2010 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Aspergillus...

Physicians say Canadians should be taking more supplementsNew and updated guidelines on recommended vitamin D intake have been published this week in the online issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). Dr. David Hanley, professor at the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine, and member of Osteoporosis Canada's (OC) Scientific Advisory Council, is the lead author of the paper on behalf of Osteoporosis Canada. "OC's current recommendations on vitamin D intake for Canadians are more than 10 years old, and since then, there has been a lot of new and exciting research in this area," says Hanley, who is...

Previously I have highlighted the benefits vitamin D has with regard to improving the immune response and helping keep infections such as flu at bay. It has been mooted that the upsurge in viral infections during the winter is connected with the generally lower vitamin D levels at this time. The traditional view is that winter infections are due to “indoor crowding.”However, research indicates that flu epidemics do not occur in the summer in crowded workplaces despite the presence of the flu virus around people who should be susceptible to infection. This is based on research by the Centers for...

The amount of cholesterol circulating in the bloodstream is partly regulated by the brain, a study in mice suggests. It counters assumptions that levels are solely controlled by what we eat and by cholesterol production in the liver. The US study in Nature Neuroscience found that a hunger hormone in the brain acts as the "remote control" for cholesterol travelling round the body.Too much cholesterol causes hardened fatty arteries, raising the risk of a heart attack. The research carried out by a US team at the University of Cincinnati found that increased levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin in mice...

A pair of new studies has uncovered evidence that low levels of vitamin D could lead to poor blood sugar control among diabetics and increase the risk of developing metabolic syndrome among seniors. ..... More than 90 percent of the patients, who ranged in age from 36 to 89, had either vitamin D deficiency or insufficiency, the authors found, despite the fact that they all had had routine primary care visits before their specialty visit. Just about 6 percent of the patients were taking a vitamin D supplement at the time of their visit, the research team noted, and those...

I need some help and I thought freepers could help. My daughter has low vitamin d due to anti-seizure medication she is taking. We are giving her 4000 IU of D3 every, but her levels have only gone from 19-24 (under 30 is deficient), and we've been supplementing for over a year. Our pediatrician is not sure what to do. My daughter is also symptomatic of low Vitamin D. This past year she has gotten lots of colds, her allergies are worse, and her problems with asthma are significantly worse. I know there have been lots of posts about problems...

Women living in the northeastern United States are more likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis (RA), suggesting a link between the autoimmune disease and vitamin D deficiency, says a new study led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher. In the paper, which appears online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, a spatial analysis led by Dr. Verónica Vieira, MS, DSc, associate professor of environmental health, found that women in states like Vermont, New Hampshire and southern Maine were more likely to report being diagnosed with RA. "There's higher risk in the northern latitudes," Dr. Vieira said. "This might...

MADISON — For more than 30 years, scientists have known that multiple sclerosis (MS) is much more common in higher latitudes than in the tropics. Because sunlight is more abundant near the equator, many researchers have wondered if the high levels of vitamin D engendered by sunlight could explain this unusual pattern of prevalence. Vitamin D may reduce the symptoms of MS, says Hector DeLuca, Steenbock Research Professor of Biochemistry at University of Wisconsin-Madison, but in a study published in PNAS this week, he and first author Bryan Becklund suggest that the ultraviolet portion of sunlight may play a bigger...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — A new study has found that the amount of vitamin D (http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2008-mchi/4904.html) in patients being treated for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (http://www.mayoclinic.org/non-hodgkins-lymphoma/)was strongly associated with cancer progression and overall survival. The results will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (http://www.hematology.org/) in New Orleans. "These are some of the strongest findings yet between vitamin D and cancer outcome," says the study's lead investigator, Matthew Drake, M.D., Ph.D., (http://www.mayoclinic.org/bio/13726218.html) an endocrinologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. "While these findings are very provocative, they are preliminary and need to be validated in other studies....

Early research findings may lead to new treatments for the diseaseUCLA scientists and colleagues from UC Riverside and the Human BioMolecular Research Institute have found that a form of vitamin D, together with a chemical found in turmeric spice called curcumin, may help stimulate the immune system to clear the brain of amyloid beta, which forms the plaques considered the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The early research findings, which appear in the July issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, may lead to new approaches in preventing and treating Alzheimer's by utilizing the property of vitamin D3 — a form...

Vitamin D Tied to Hypertension, Hyperglycemia: Teens with the lowest vitamin D levels had low HDL, metabolic syndrome, and high triglicerides. Low serum levels of vitamin D were linked to increased blood pressure, hyperglycemia, and obesity in an analysis of more than 3,500 American teenagers, a link previously seen in adults. “Vitamin D plays a useful role in general human health. We are just now beginning to understand the role that vitamin D may play in cardiovascular health,” said Dr. Jared P. Reis, who presented a poster on the associations of vitamin D levels and cardiovascular risk factors at a...

Vitamin D supplements may help prevent fractures in people over 65, provided they take enough of the right kind. A new review of clinical trials appears to show a strong dose-dependent effect for vitamin D in lowering the risk for nonvertebral fractures in the elderly. --snip-- The type of vitamin D made a difference. The effect of vitamin D3 was significant, with a 23 percent risk reduction, but there was no significant reduction with vitamin D2. The authors suggest that D3 is more effective in maintaining blood levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the active form that the supplement takes in the...

Men With Vitamin D Deficiency May Have Increased Risk Of Heart Attack ScienceDaily (Jun. 11, 2008) — Low levels of vitamin D appear to be associated with higher risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack) in men, according to a new report. Studies have shown that the rates of cardiovascular disease-related deaths are increased at higher latitudes and during the winter months and are lower at high altitudes, according to background information in the article. "This pattern is consistent with an adverse effect of hypovitaminosis D [vitamin D deficiency], which is more prevalent at higher latitudes, during the winter and at...

The claims have been sensational. Martin Mittelstaedt checks up on the research behind the hypeIn the summer of 1974, brothers Frank and Cedric Garland had a heretical brainwave. The young epidemiologists were watching a presentation on death rates from cancer county by county across the United States. As they sat in a lecture hall at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore looking at the colour-coded cancer maps, they noticed a striking pattern, with the map for colon cancer the most pronounced. Counties with high death rates were red; those with low rates were blue. Oddly, the nation was almost neatly divided...

Vitamin D Deficiency Study Raises New Questions About Disease And Supplements ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2008) — Low blood levels of vitamin D have long been associated with disease, and the assumption has been that vitamin D supplements may protect against disease. However, this new research demonstrates that ingested vitamin D is immunosuppressive and that low blood levels of vitamin D may be actually a result of the disease process. Supplementation may make the disease worse. In a new report Trevor Marshall, Ph.D., professor at Australia’s Murdoch University School of Biological Medicine and Biotechnology, explains how increased vitamin D intake affects...

In early April of 2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi: upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an epidemic. The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would...

The Antibiotic VitaminDeficiency in vitamin D may predispose people to infection Janet Raloff In April 2005, a virulent strain of influenza hit a maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital for men that's midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. John J. Cannell, a psychiatrist there, observed with increasing curiosity as one infected ward after another was quarantined to limit the outbreak. Although 10 percent of the facility's 1,200 patients ultimately developed the flu's fever and debilitating muscle aches, none did in the ward that he supervised. WINTER WOES. Cold-weather wear and the sun's angle in the winter sky limit how much ultraviolet...