Researchers found that people with asthma who took vitamin D supplements along with conventional medications were 50% less likely to visit the emergency room or need to be hospitalized as a result of an asthma attack. What’s more, vitamin D supplementation has been associated with a reduced need for steroid injections or pills after an asthma attack.
Asthma is one of the biggest health problems worldwide, affecting about 300 million children and adults. In the United States alone, about twenty-five million people have asthma, and this number is growing every year. While there is currently no cure for asthma, there are medications that can help patients manage the condition and reduce their risk of developing the disease. Unfortunately, these medications are not always effective; There are about 1.8 million emergency room visits for seizures each year in the US, and the disease causes ten deaths in the country each year. Thus, researchers are looking for ways to further reduce the severity of asthma. Could vitamin D be such a strategy? Vitamin D is good for human health. It not only aids in the absorption of calcium, which is vital for healthy bones, but also strengthens the immune system. It is the latter function that led researchers to explore vitamin D as a possible treatment for asthma. Respiratory infections such as the common cold or the flu are known to cause asthma symptoms, including inflammation of the airways, which can trigger an asthmatic attack. Some studies have shown that vitamin D may help reduce the risk of developing asthma caused by a respiratory infection by boosting the immune system. To better understand this link, the authors reviewed seven randomized controlled trials that looked at the effect of vitamin D supplementation on asthma severity. The review included a total of nine hundred and fifty-five people with asthma, all of whom received standard care. Vitamin D supplementation was found to reduce the need for asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations by 50% compared to placebo, while the number of such events drops from 6% to 3%. In addition, among adults who experienced an asthma attack, vitamin D supplementation reduced the need for treatment with steroid tablets or injections by 30% from 0.43 cases per person per year to 0.30 cases .From a subgroup analysis, the researchers found that patients who had low vitamin D levels experienced the greatest benefit from vitamin D supplements; their need for treatment with steroid tablets or injections decreased by 55%. However, it was noted that the small number of participants in each subgroup made it difficult to confirm whether starting vitamin D levels affected the effect of supplementation on asthma. It is also important to note that vitamin D supplementation was safe for the participants at the doses used, and there was no differences in side effects between subjects who took vitamin D and those who took placebo. Overall, the researchers believe their results show that vitamin D supplementation may be an effective way to reduce the severity of asthma. Vitamin D is safe to take and relatively inexpensive, the authors noted, so it represents a potentially cost-effective strategy to address problems. Because the majority of study participants were adults with mild to moderate asthma, the results cannot currently be applied to children or people with more severe asthma.
Further clinical trials are ongoing internationally, and the researchers hope to include data from them in a future analysis to determine if today’s results hold up in an even larger and more diverse group of patients.