Researchers in Edmonton are among several groups around the world looking into whether there’s any benefit of boosting vitamin D levels in a patient’s blood as a means of protecting them against COVID-19.
Dr. Aldo J. Montano-Loza, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, is preparing to launch a study of at least 70 Albertans who contracted COVID-19 to see if their vitamin D levels put them at risk of severe infection and whether boosting these levels will help their condition.
There is some urgency to this work, as more studies point to a possible link between the so-called “sunshine vitamin” and the severity of the coronavirus infection. There has also been an increasing number of studies showing vitamin D is somehow linked to COVID-19., doctors found that 100 per cent of the sickest patients under the age of 75 were deficient in the vitamin, many of them to critical levels.
“You see that it’s people of colour, it’s elderly people, it’s people with chronic diseases, it’s people in nursing homes, and what these people all have in common is that they have lower vitamin D levels,” said William B. Grant, director of the Sunlight, Nutrition, and Health Research Center in San Francisco, Calif.
This area of study is still in its early stages, however, and doctors don’t yet know whether there’s another factor at play here, so researchers around the world have turned totesting supplements of the vitamin in deficient COVID-19 patients to see if it helps. which states that while early research warrants further study, currently “there is no strong scientific evidence to show that very high intakes of vitamin D will be beneficial in preventing or treating COVID-19.”
However, if the new research shows there’s something to it, it could become a cheap, easy and virtually risk-free form of treatment, Lau said.
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