Vitamin D high in Crohn's disease patients

Technology

Vitamin D high in Crohn's disease patients

Close

Patients with Crohn's disease are likely to have active form of vitamin D in their blood.

10 October,2011 02:40 pm

Contrary to expectations, people with the inflammatory bowel condition Crohns disease are likely to have excessive levels of the active form of vitamin D in their blood, researchers have found. This is associated with low bone mineral density, they report.Dr. Maria T. Abreu from the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles led the study. She said, Most doctors think that Crohns patients automatically have decreased vitamin D levels and encourage supplementation with vitamin D. We would like to urge doctors to check vitamin D levels before making that recommendation.As Abreus team explains in the medical journal Gut, under certain circumstances too much active vitamin D can actually contribute to the breakdown of bone, leading to osteoporosis.The researchers found inappropriately high blood levels of the active form of vitamin D in 42 percent of the 138 people they studied with Crohns disease. This was true of only 7 percent of 29 patients with ulcerative colitis, another type of inflammatory bowel disease.Also, the higher the blood levels of active vitamin D in Crohns patients, the lower was their bone density -- regardless of whether they were treated with steroids -- the investigators found.A high vitamin D level is an additional risk factor predisposing to development of osteoporosis for some Crohns disease patients, the team concludes. Treatment of the underlying inflammation, may improve metabolic bone disease.