Vitamin D and Mental Health

It was with interest that I read Dr. Soram Khalsa's post on The Huffington Post about the Vitamin D epidemic in this country today. The medical doctor writes this:

As a board certified internist, I have chosen, for the last 30 years, to take a personalized approach in my practice of integrative medicine. I have worked with literally hundreds of herbs, vitamins and dietary supplements, to help my patients, often when drugs did not work. In all this time, I have not seen one nutritional supplement that has the power to affect human health as much as vitamin D. This is because Vitamin D is not actually a vitamin -- it is a hormone that has the ability to interact and affect more than 2,000 genes in the body.

Over my 30 years of practicing medicine, countless times I have had to deliver or discuss with a patient their sad and possibly terminal diagnosis. Diseases like cancer and heart disease are at best life altering, and most times life threatening. When I have this kind of difficult conversation with a patient, I often reflect that if their vitamin D level had been normal for the previous many years, maybe they would never have developed this disease.

Ideally, your health care provider is your partner in exploring your vitamin D status, but patients usually do not want to visit their doctor just to ask for a vitamin D level, and many doctors are not yet up to date on the importance of vitamin D. If you use the at-home test kit and your blood level of vitamin D is low, I would encourage you to discuss this information with your physician.

I found this particularly interesting because a few weeks ago, I spoke to a highly-recommended internist about my overall health. She had me get all kinds of blood work done, and in her summary, she wrote that most of my levels looked good with exception to my vitamin D. I had a substantial deficiency that she suspected could explain my symptoms of fatigue and sluggishness.

She gave me a prescription for a potent vitamin D tablet that I'm supposed to take weekly for 10 weeks, and get my blood retested at that point. If my levels look okay, she told me to take a supplement of at least 2000 IU daily. This is my third week taking the super loaded vitamin D and I do feel more energetic and a tad less irritable (not that any family members would agree with me).

My internist and I talked about vitamin D for about 10 minutes in her office. She said that most of her patients had deficiencies lately, especially her female patients. She advised me that the best way to get it, of course, was sunlight, and that sunscreen actually blocks it from your system. And she's not totally pro-vitamin, either. She thinks that you are much better off eating healthy foods than taking supplements, that your body can't process the high levels of vitamins and minerals that are sold in health food aisles.

But vitamin D isn't found in any food, she explained, so that's why it's essential to take a supplement.

I've been wondering how vitamin D and mental illness are related, so I did a search and found that vitamin D does, indeed, play a role in mental illness based on these reasons from the Vitamin D Council's website:

1. Epidemiological evidence shows an association between reduced sun exposure and mental illness.
2. Mental illness is associated with low 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] levels.
3. Mental illness shows a significant comorbidity with illnesses thought to be associated with vitamin D deficiency.
4. Theoretical models (in vitro or animal evidence) exist to explain how vitamin D deficiency may play a causative role in mental illness.
5. Studies indicate vitamin D improves mental illness.

Here's even more details, according to the Vitamin D Council:

• Mental illness has increased as humans have migrated out of the sun.
  
• There is epidemiological evidence that associates vitamin D deficiency with mental illness. Two small reports studied the association of low 25(OH)D levels with mental illness and both were positive.
• Depression has significant co-morbidity with illnesses associated with hypovitaminosis D such as osteoporosis, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.
• Vitamin D has a significant biochemistry in the brain. Nuclear receptors for vitamin D exist in the brain and vitamin D is involved in the biosynthesis of neurotrophic factors, synthesis of nitric oxide synthase, and increased glutathione levels -- all suggesting an important role for vitamin D in brain function. Rats born to severely vitamin D deficient dams have profound brain abnormalities.
  

Yikes.

***

Originally published on Beyond Blue at Beliefnet.com. To read more of Therese, visit her blog, Beyond Blue at Beliefnet.com, or subscribe here. You may also find her at www.thereseborchard.com.

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Comments

[mbarnes]

11:31 AM on 07/18/2009

If you are interested in vitamin D you should take a look at www.vitaminD3world.com The Canadian Cancer Society now recommends that everyone take vitamin D to prevent cancer. The site has good summaries of the data and offers a new preparation of vitamin D in a micro-pill formulation. The pills have been formulated with cellulose which absorbs water very quickly. This ensures that the pill breaks up very quickly to provide for maximum absorption. The micro pill is tiny and tasteless. Many vitamin D pills on the market have very poor dissolution properties resulting in poor absorption.
The site also offers to supply customers with a free supply of 400IU for their children and it also has a good newsletter.

[GypsyJack]

11:24 PM on 07/14/2009

We are born spiritual, emotional, mental and physical. Spirit is our union with living planet. We are predisposed to accepting spirituality as a religious event. We have two sets of emotions, the one reflecting our lives and the one supplied by the spirit reflecting the state of the planet. Take a look around at our actions on the planet. the wars ,the violence, the oppression the stress. These are the contributors to mental illness. Millennia of violence and anguish have produced imbalances in nature. Mental illness is not a chemical imbalance, it derives from spiritual imbalances. Because doctors or science never look in that direction, the answer is never found. The religification of science over the past couple of centuries have buried answers that could help the healing of not only our bodies but the planet as well. Science is not looking to understand the physical evidence but seem to be trying to prove something beyond what is commonly seen. In other words science debates fact like christians debate theology, as if everything is merely a theory. Doctors depend on science but science no longer find the physically obvious enough to accept as proof. Promises of actual natural benefits, such as sun shine, in a pill form will never ever make up for sitting in the sun.

Gypsy

[dieselis]

03:21 PM on 07/12/2009

i'm severly handicapped individual. i spend days inside without much sunlight. so i can vouch for this story. when inside 2-3 days or more cabin fever really sets in, i go out and the difference is like day and night. i try to go out more. also testosterone levels cause great fatique. bloodwork is a cornerstone of diagnostic medicine. its usually inexpensive. if you have the time you should learn to read your results. the www.internet puts a world of information at your fingertips. docters will be quick to remind you they have the degree and some get their feathers pretty ruffled when you challenge them. some are fine with it and encourage you, so stick to your guns and make them prove you wrong. you may have to remind some even though they have a degree their just practicing. be tactful and respectful. let them know even though your quite knowledgable you don't know everything and that he/she doesn't either. most come around when they know your just trying to stay as healthy as possible. knowing your body is the best physician you can have. if you have the time its well worth it.

[DrJulienArbor]

02:23 PM on 07/13/2009

The answer to your vitamin D problem is in your very first sentence... " i spend days inside without much sunlight."

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin... meaning that while many people are deficient (due to inadequate sun exposure)... vitamin D supplementation can also become toxic.

And to offset the challenges that will likely come regarding sun exposure and skin cancer.... I would suggest you do your research on the rates of skin cancer in migrant worker before and after the use of chemicals in agriculture as well as the correlational studies between the rates of skin cancer and the use of chemical-laden sun screens.

[yournontoxiclife]

10:10 PM on 07/11/2009

And here we were all milky white and smooth, proud that we were being so "good" about our SPF-factors. No wonder we're all so CRABBY!

[Downix]

06:39 PM on 07/11/2009

I just was diagnosed with VitD deficiency as well, taking suppliments + changing my diet to more tofu and soy products, both high in VitD. In the week of doing this, I've already noticed a dramatic improvement in my mental state.

[SharonMcEachern]

07:48 AM on 07/11/2009

Ethic Soup blog has a good article on vitamin D which points out that even nursing babies aren't getting enough D from their mothers' breast milk today and reminds that this vitamin helps prevent rickets and may help prevent osteoporosis. Doctors are seeing teen athletes with osteoporosis. The article also mentions that O.J. Simpson suffered from rickets as a kid and had to wear leg braces. (Wonder if O.J. is getting much sun, or vitamin D supplements in prison.) You can read more at:

http://www.ethicsoup.com/2008/10/slather-up-with-sunscreen-or-let-the-sunshine-in.html

[Alex Portland]

06:43 AM on 07/11/2009

Vitamin D has many connections with Osteoporosis and Psoriasis too:
http://www.curehunter.com/public/keywordSummaryD014807.do

And there appear to be a few side effects and interactions, so read up:
http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind.asp#h8

I wonder if there have been controlled studies where people were given Vitamin D and sunlight vs just sunlight.

[Lesscancer]

11:15 PM on 07/10/2009

Vitamin D from a multivitamin or single supplement can lower the risk of colon and possibly many other cancers.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/vitamins/

Bill Couzens Founder Less Cancer

[goodnews7]

09:41 PM on 07/10/2009

Sunshine :->) makes one feel good it's true.

[emmasvoice]

06:47 PM on 07/10/2009

Thank you for this article. It really gave me insight into why my Internist recently put me on a 10 week , prescribed high dose vitamin D pill (one per week). I go back for another blood test in August. This insight helps me very much, since I thought the purpose was due entirely to my bone density. I'll bring a copy of this article to him. Thanks again!

[MJinCanada]

05:36 PM on 07/10/2009

One of the things I remember from a science show interview with a vitamin D researcher is the fact that the body can make 50,000 units of vitamin D in a day's worth of sun exposure. Obviously, the research pointed out, it has to be important but they've only started looking at all the physical and mental effects of vitamin D beyond preventing ricketts.