Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. In the absence of vitamin D, the body cannot metabolize or absorb calcium and phosphorus, the minerals with the most important role for skeletal development. New-born babies and infants up to two years of age require constant administration of vitamin D under pediatric observation to insure that they develop correctly.

Normally the body can secret and store vitamin D following sun exposure. Yet, with the over-emphasized need to protect ourselves from sun radiation, we have come to increase the phenomenon of vitamin D deficiency due to insufficiency. Vitamin D deficiency can be treated with a diet rich in fat fish and by supplementation. The right dosage to be administered is prescribed by the doctor depending on the patient’s age and the health condition. Senior citizens and children are the most likely to develop vitamin D deficiency.

The accelerated growth rate, dental eruption and skeletal development go hand in hand with vitamin D deficiency in children. Mothers should be careful to take their kids to periodical medical checkups and make sure that they have a balanced nutrition and healthy open air activities. As for the elderly, the body’s capacity to produce and store vitamin D declines with advancing age. An older person will need twice more vitamin D from food than a young person. And here we also have half an explanation for the incidence rate of osteoporosis with middle-aged and elderly women.

Modification of the rib cage and the bone structure appear in children with vitamin D deficiency. The sternum deepens in the chest and the rigs become protruding. In adults, severe vitamin D deficiency could be manifest with bone and muscular pains. The examination involves the pressing of the sternum bone and the tibia. These are the bones that usually reveal the consequences of vitamin D deficiency.

The patient’s medical specificity influences the treatment for vitamin D deficiency. Blood tests, manual examination and radiology tests usually make the basis for diagnosis. The calcium level in the blood is often considered relevant for the diagnosis of vitamin D deficiency. It is essential to act in the direction of preventing vitamin D deficiency by enough sun exposure and a balanced diet. Pay attention to the use of medication that prevents calcium absorption.

Vitamin D Deficiency-a Way to Explain Most Modern Disease?

This is the decade of vitamin D.
Researchers can’t stop talking about it, scientists keep discovering intriguing secrets to do with it, and doctors are discovering that just about everyone is deficient in it. There’s just one problem in the deficiency measurement though – they aren’t completely sure what exactly the recommended amount should be. While nothing is completely conclusive today, what they’re discovering every day seems to point to far more damage that we could risk from defeiciencies than our elementary school junior high textbooks ever told us about (which was that the deficiency could affect bone strength). What is coming out of research each day is that there is not one part of the body that doesn’t need of vitamin D for its function – the brain, all the muscles, digestive system, you name it.

The worst part is that a vitamin D deficiency predisposes us to just about every variety of modern illness that we seem to hear about far more today than we ever did before: cancers of the colon, breast and prostate gland, stubborn high blood pressure and heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and autoimmune problems. Yes, it sounds like a pretty thorough list of everything that ails modern society.

UVB rays from the sun are our main source of vitamin D; the skin absorbs them and processes them. How could evolution have ever known that it couldn’t depend on a supply of vitamin D in the future especially when it saw the first humans of all, in the hottest parts of the world near the equator, running about with not a stitch on? Now the body doesn’t actually use vitamin D and its original form; it passes it through the skin, the liver, the kidneys and then changes it into something known as the vitamin D hormone – the biological form that is actually usable to the body. Vitamin D when it leaves the liver exits in a form called 25-hydroxyvitamin D. That mouthful is what your doctor measures in blood serum tests to see how you’re doing.

So is there anything you can do – foods you can eat, supplements you can can take? Vitamin D isn’t really easily available in any food; oily fish caught in the wild, oranges, baby formula and perhaps cereal could be the richest sources, though that isn’t saying much. Here’s an interesting tidbit that rises out of that little example of a food with a vitamin D – baby formula. Surprisingly, in really cold countries such as this one, babies that are completely breast-fed and never come into contact with formula do suffer from vitamin D deficiency. The right vitamin D measure in normal blood is about 40 ng/ml; most people around these parts measure with mostly 15ng/ml; and black people have even less. As important as it is to use sunscreen, to do without once in a while could easily help.

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