Vitamin D Levels And Alzheimer’s Disease
Vitamin D is an essential vitamin thats required for a plethora of vital functions throughout the body, including cognitive health and neuroprotection. And like Alzheimers, vitamin D deficiency is shockingly prevalent in the U.S. A whopping 29% of adults are deficient in vitamin D, and another 41% are insufficient in the critical nutrient.
Growing evidence suggests vitamin D deficiency and cognitive decline are intrinsically linked:
In a 2019 BMC Neurology meta-analysis2of 21,784 participants, researchers found significant associations between vitamin D deficiency and both dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
How Is Your Memory And Concentration
Rather than wrongly assuming that failing memory and concentration is an inevitable part of the ageing process its better to get tested using our free on line Cognitive Function Test, validated for anyone over the age of 50. This tests all the critical cognitive functions that can decline with age, and tells you what to do about it to reduce age-related cognitive decline. For reasons explained below, if your cognitive function tests below par it is vital to have a homocysteine blood test, available from your doctor or from a private clinic.
Vitamin D Deficiency Linked To Increased Dementia And Stroke Risk
- Over 55 million people globally live with dementia, with researchers estimating that number to grow to 78 million by 2030.
- Researchers from the University of South Australia uncovered evidence linking vitamin D deficiency to an increased risk for dementia and stroke.
- Scientists agree more research is required to fully understand the link between vitamin D and heightened dementia risk.
Vitamin D has long been touted as an important part of a persons health. Not only is it crucial for
Adding to this list, researchers from the University of South Australia believe they have evidence linking vitamin D deficiency to an increased risk for dementia and stroke.
The study was recently published in
collection of diseases that affect a persons cognitive abilities. Dementia affects peoples ability to think, remember, and communicate normally.
Over 55 million people globally live with dementia. Researchers believe that number will grow to 78 million by 2030.
The most common type of dementia is
Recommended Reading: Do People With Dementia Hallucinate
Discover The Alzheimers Prevention Diet
One of the best ways you can feed your brain for better memory is by avoiding a diet high in trans-fat and saturated fat. These fats, such as those from animal products , can cause inflammation as well as produce free radicals. As you probably know, free radicals are a normal by-product of your metabolism, but in high quantities, they can damage and even kill your valuable brain cells.
Eating foods that are high in antioxidants like vitamins C and E is a wonderful natural way to eliminate free radicals from your body. In a similar way, scientists believe that a vast intake of fruits and vegetables, eating fish rich in omega-3 oils and vegetarian protein substitutes are protective against memory loss.
In addition to your renewed Alzheimers diet, read on to find out more about the best vitamins and nutrients to aid your memory and avoid Alzheimers disease early symptoms.
The ideal prevention diet breaks down like this:
- 20% good fats. Items in this group include extra virgin olive oil, avocado, and flax seed oil
- 40% lean proteins. Look to include fish, chicken, turkey, and soy on a daily basis.
- 40% complex carbohydrates. Discover the rewards of a rainbow of fresh vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and fresh fruits.
- Superfoods for the brain as much as you want! These superfoods, including blueberries, spinach, and seaweed, have fabulous antioxidant properties preventing causes of Alzheimers.
Be Sure To Take Your Vitamins And Memory
If youre serious about the prevention of Alzheimers and improving memory loss, you should definitely take a high potency multiple vitamin and mineral capsule. Be sure the vitamin formula you choose contains folic acid and vitamin C. Folic acid reduces homocysteine levelshigh homocysteine levels put you at risk for both heart disease and memory loss. Vitamin C has been shown to reduce your risk of Alzheimers disease by 20% when taken with vitamin E. To take advantage of its fullest benefits, you should take a dose of 2,000 mg of vitamin C per day.
When you create a balanced diet that puts your overall wellbeing at the forefront, youre not only doing good for your body, but youre also supporting and enhancing your memory as well.
Consider including the following memory-specific nutrients in your daily vitamin plan:
Discover our latest research update in the Summer 2014 White Paper.
You May Like: What’s The Difference Of Alzheimer’s And Dementia
B Vitamins: B3 B6 B12 & Folic Acid
B Vitamins
B Vitamins have an important role in the human brain and nervous system. They are responsible for the creation and maintenance of cells in the brain.
Researchers at the University of Oxford and at the CDC found that individuals who took a B Vitamin supplement were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s Disease than those who did not.
Validation Study Of The Vital
Cognitive assessment by phone has been extensively validated,. In VITAL-Cog, we validated our telephone cognitive assessment against in-person assessments among a subset of 181 of the 262 CTSC participants with both assessments who had the two within 1 month of each other. We compared the global composite score derived from scores on the eight tests administered by telephone versus a similar score derived from the nine tests administered in-person. The intraclass correlation between the two modes was 0.64, supporting the validity of our telephone cognitive interview .
Read Also: Do Aluminum Cans Cause Alzheimer’s
Low Vitamin D Levels Associated With Dementia
|
Image: Thinkstock |
You can add low vitamin D levels to the list of risk factors associated with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. A study published online in Neurology on Aug. 6, 2014, found that in people ages 65 and older, low levels of vitamin D in the blood were associated with a 53% increased risk for developing dementia, and about a 70% increased risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease , compared with normal blood levels of vitamin D. Blood levels of vitamin D that were extremely low were associated with even higher risks: 125% for developing dementia, and 120% for developing AD. The study didn’t show that low and extremely low vitamin D levels cause dementia or Alzheimer’s, and it didn’t show that taking vitamin D pills or increasing the amount of vitamin D in the diet would prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s. But could it help? “I would be very surprised if vitamin D supplementation alone would offer protection against dementia. AD is a process 15 to 20-plus years in the making, and most if not all of the mechanisms are probably in place five or six years before a dementia diagnosis,” says neurologist Dr. Scott McGinnis, a Harvard Medical School instructor. Meantime, get your Recommended Dietary Allowance of vitamin D, which you need for strong bones, immune function, and cell growth.
To continue reading this article, you must log in.
Limitations Of Current Evidence And Future Aims
There are several limitations of the current evidence base regarding vitamin D and its potential association with cognitive decline, dementia and AD. There is a lack of uniformity in the operationalization of vitamin D concentrations in observational studies, with a variety of different cut-points used to investigate the association with cognitive and neuroimaging outcomes. This is perhaps unsurprising considering there is an ongoing debate surrounding what the optimal vitamin D concentrations are for general health. In the US the Institute of Medicine recommends serum 25D concentrations of 50 nmol/L as sufficient whereas the Endocrine Society recommends concentrations 75 nmol/L. There is a need to standardise clinically relevant 25D cut-points in order to aid the interpretation of the research literature.
Read Also: Symptoms Of Dementia Early Stages
Vitamin D For Alzheimers Disease
Vitamin D levels are linked to having sufficient access to sunlight and promote bone health. Over the last decade or so, vitamin D has increasingly been studied as a potential neuroprotective agent and people are interested in whether it may prevent or slow Alzheimerâs disease and other forms of dementia. However, conflicting results from clinical research into its potential benefits makes it difficult to answer whether patients should be taking a supplement or not.
While there is fairly convincing evidence that vitamin D deficiency is not good for your brain, there is no convincing evidence that simply taking a supplementary pill will improve brain function. A 2018 meta-analysis comparing 73 studies that investigated the link between vitamin D and neurodegenerative disease, for instance, found no significant evidence of a neuroprotective benefit of vitamin D . Again, while much of the available research does find an association between this vitamin and cognitive decline, this is correlational and does not clearly identify whether lower levels of vitamin D cause dementia or whether they are simply a symptom of it.
Standard Protocol Approvals Registrations And Patient Consents
The research followed the Declaration of Helsinki, and this substudy protocol was approved by the institutional review board of the Brigham and Womens Hospital. Written informed consent was obtained directly from VITAL participants and CTSC-Cog participants or from their legally authorized representatives/next of kin for VITAL-Cog, completion of cognitive tests was considered as implied consent.
Don’t Miss: How To Get A Dementia Patient To Wear Depends
Consider Vitamin D In Alzheimer’s Prevention And Management
Richard S. Isaacson, MD
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
I’m Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian.
Over the years, evolving evidence has helped our understanding of whether vitamin D has any potential neuroprotective or therapeutic effect when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease. During that time, we’ve learned more and more about the relationship between vitamin D and other neurologic conditions, such as multiple sclerosis, and its potential protective effects and mechanisms. But from a practical clinical perspective, what is the real story with vitamin D and Alzheimer’s prevention and treatment?
When you look at epidemiologic data, it does appear that vitamin D potentially has a protective effect when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease. Does that mean that vitamin D should be utilized when trying to reduce a person’s risk for Alzheimer’s? Well, it depends. If a person’s vitamin D level is 25 , 20, or lower, then maybe it makes some practical sense that we should, at a minimum, try to target a vitamin D level above 30. However, an important 2014 study in the journal Neurology investigating the optimal target level for vitamin D suggests that aiming toward 50 nmol/L may have a better therapeutic effect when it comes to prevention and risk reduction for dementia.
Vitamin D And Neurological Functions
Changes in vitamin D regulated neuronal calcium status have been implicated in pathological processes associated with dementia and AD , with evidence of dysregulated L-Type voltage-sensitive calcium channel function . In rodents, administration of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D promotes neuroprotection and reduces the Ca2+ mediated hippocampal biomarkers of aging through the downregulation of L-VSCC activity . Serum Ca2+ concentrations are also regulated by parathyroid hormone , which is in turn involved in the conversion of 25D to 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D . Furthermore, vitamin D deficiency may lead to hyperparathyroidism which has been linked with non-skeletal health outcomes, such as the loss of muscle strength and mass and sudden cardiac death . It is plausible that high PTH concentrations could mediate the association between low vitamin D concentrations and dementia-related outcomes. The evidence, mainly from poor quality cross-sectional studies, shows an inconsistent association between high PTH concentrations and poorer cognitive outcomes. .
Don’t Miss: What Is Dementia Caused By
Study Bolsters Evidence Of Link Between Vitamin D And Dementia
A more recent study published in JAMA Neurology adds to the growing body of evidence linking low vitamin D levels to cognitive decline. The most recent study to demonstrate the importance of vitamin D to brain health involved 382 participants with an average age of 75.5 years. Some participants had dementia, others had mild cognitive decline and others were healthy.
Researchers took blood tests every year for five years to evaluate the vitamin D levels in each participant and found that participants who had been diagnosed with dementia had a lower vitamin D average than the other groups. Researchers also conducted cognitive tests that evaluated episodic memory, semantic memory, visual perception and executive function. Those tests showed that participants with lower levels of vitamin D demonstrated a greater decline in both cognitive ability and episodic memory.
Vitamin D insufficiency was associated with significantly faster declines in both episodic memory and executive function performance, which may correspond to elevated risk for incident AD dementia.
Researchers also note that the study does not prove how the two are related and that it remains to be determined whether vitamin D supplementation slows cognitive decline.
Stress Cortisol And Memory Loss
Under prolonged stress, the body produces the adrenal hormone cortisol. The research of Professor Robert Sapolsky at Stanford University has shown that although cortisol is a powerful anti-inflammatory hormone, raised cortisol can damage the brain . In studies with rats he found that two weeks of induced stress causing raised cortisol levels causes dendrites, those connections between brain cells, to shrivel up . He believes that brain cell loss in ageing and Alzheimers may be, in part, due to high levels of cortisol and recommends that corticosteroid drugs should not be used in Alzheimers patients for other medical problems like asthma or arthritis.
Using a brain imaging technique, Douglas Bremner of Yale University has shown that the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory is smaller in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that this correlates with poorer memory . Researchers at the La Sapienza University have shown that cortisol levels are significantly higher in Alzheimers patients than in controls, and correlate with the severity of the disease . Linda Carlson and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal have confirmed that in Alzheimers patients, the higher the cortisol, the worse their memory . They also found that the higher the levels of DHEA the better their memory.
Don’t Miss: Alzheimer’s Disease Research Studies
The Connection Between Vitamin D And Dementia
An international research team conducted a study that observed over 1,600 seniors for six years. They found that those who were severely deficient in vitamin D were more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimers and dementia than those who had adequate levels.
Participants who were only mildly deficient had an increased risk of 53%, while those who were severely deficient had a 125% increased risk of developing dementia.
Lead author David Llewellyn, of the University of Exeter Medical School, said:
We expected to find an association between low vitamin D levels and the risk of dementia and Alzheimers disease, but the results were surprising we actually found that the association was twice as strong as we anticipated.
The study showed a strong link between dementia and vitamin D deficiency, but researchers are not yet ready to say that a vitamin D deficiency causes dementia. Clinical trials and further research are needed to establish whether adequate levels of the vitamin can prevent or treat the disease.
Shedding Light On Vitamin D
Researchers analyzed genetic data from almost 295,000 participants in the UK Biobank biomedical database for this study. Scientists measured variations in participants genes to find how a low vitamin D level impacted a persons neuroimaging of the brain and their risk for dementia and stroke.
Researchers associated a lower vitamin D level with a lower brain volume and an increased risk of dementia and stroke. They also stated their genetic analysis supports vitamin D deficiencys causal effect on dementia.
According to Prof. Elina Hyppönen, senior investigator and director of the Australian Centre for Precision Health at the University of South Australia, researchers have long suspected that vitamin D may have implications for the development of neurocognitive diseases such as dementia. However, evidence about whether these effects are causal has been lacking.
Indeed, it has been very difficult to prove the effects of vitamin D on brain health or other diseases, in large part as clinical trials in people who are clinically vitamin D deficient would not be ethical to conduct, Prof. Hyppönen told Medical News Today.
Therefore, using a novel genetic design, we wanted to see whether we can provide causal evidence for a role of vitamin D in brain health, and specifically, to see whether improvements in vitamin D status among people who are vitamin D deficient will help, she explained.
However, more recent research supports vitamin Ds role may play in dementia prevention.
Read Also: What Is Difference Between Delirium And Dementia
Link Found Between Vitamin D Deficiency And Dementia
Link Found Between Vitamin D Deficiency and Dementia
December 10, 2018
Vitamin D is essential for good health in aging adults and may play a role in the prevention of diabetes, hypertension and multiple sclerosis.
A recent study has found that a vitamin D deficiency may also play a role in the development of dementia. Learn more about the link found between the deficiency and the disease.
Dementia Linked To Vitamin D Deficiency Study Shows
June 20, 2022 â Vitamin D deficiency may be associated with an increased risk of dementia, according to a recent study published in TheAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Boosting low vitamin D levels to normal ranges could help protect the brain against a loss of thinking skills as people age, the study authors wrote.
âVitamin D is a hormone precursor that is increasingly recognized for widespread effects, including on brain health, but until now it has been very difficult to examine what would happen if we were able to prevent vitamin D deficiency,â Elina Hypponen, PhD, the senior study author and director of the Australian Centre for Precision Health at the University of South Australia, said in a statement.
âOur study is the first to examine the effect of very low levels of vitamin D on the risks of dementia and stroke, using robust genetic analyses among a large population,â she said.
Hypponen and colleagues analyzed data for more than 294,000 people in the study ages 37 to 73 in the UK Biobank, looking at the association between vitamin D and the risks of dementia and stroke. About 2,400 people in the study had dementia, while 3,760 had had a stroke.
The risk of dementia was predicted to be 54% higher for participants with low vitamin D levels of 25 nmol/L, as compared with those who had 50 nmol/L, which is considered a normal vitamin D level.
Vitamin D levels can be increased through sun exposure, nutrition, and supplements.
Show Sources
Read Also: How Does One Get Alzheimer’s Disease