Older people who have a severe vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of developing dementia, a study has suggested.<\/p>\n
UK researchers, writing in Neurology, looked at about 1,650 people aged over 65.<\/p>\n
This is not the first study to suggest a link – but its authors say it is the largest and most robust.<\/p>\n
However, experts say it is still too early to say elderly people should take vitamin D as a preventative treatment.<\/p>\n
There are 800,000 people with dementia in the UK with numbers set to rise to more than one million by 2021.<\/p>\n
Vitamin D comes from foods – such as oily fish, supplements and exposing skin to sunlight.<\/p>\n
However older people’s skin can be less efficient at converting sunlight into Vitamin D, making them more likely to be deficient and reliant on other sources.<\/p>\n
The international team of researchers, led by Dr David Llewellyn at the University of Exeter Medical School, followed people for six years.<\/p>\n
All were free from dementia, cardiovascular disease and stroke at the start of the study.<\/p>\n
At the end of the study they found the 1,169 with good levels of vitamin D had a one in 10 chance of developing dementia. Seventy were severely deficient – and they had around a one in five risk of dementia.<\/p>\n
‘Delay or even prevent’<\/strong><\/p>\n Dr Llewellyn said: “We expected to find an association between low vitamin D levels and the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but the results were surprising – we actually found that the association was twice as strong as we anticipated.”<\/p>\n He said further research was needed to establish if eating vitamin D rich foods such as oily fish – or taking vitamin D supplements – could “delay or even prevent” the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.<\/p>\n But Dr Llewellyn added: “We need to be cautious at this early stage and our latest results do not demonstrate that low vitamin D levels cause dementia.<\/p>\n “That said, our findings are very encouraging, and even if a small number of people could benefit, this would have enormous public health implications given the devastating and costly nature of dementia.”<\/p>\n Dr Clare Walton, research communications manager at Alzheimer’s Society, said: “A study like this can’t tell us whether being deficient in vitamin D can cause dementia.<\/p>\n “At the moment we are still unclear how the two might be linked and there is even a possibility another unknown factor could cause someone to have both dementia and low vitamin D levels.<\/p>\n “If this were the case, using supplements or sun exposure to raise vitamin D levels might have no effect on the development of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.”<\/p>\n She added: “We need to see large clinical trials to test directly whether increasing vitamin D levels could be a good way to reduce dementia in the over 65s.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Older people who have a severe vitamin D deficiency have an increased risk of developing dementia, a study has suggested. UK researchers, writing in Neurology, looked at about 1,650 people aged over 65. This is not the first study to suggest a link – but its authors say it is the largest and most robust. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":37990,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[15],"class_list":["post-37988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-chinese"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}