Researchers are discovering a potential connection between low levels of vitamin D and lingering pain. Over the former 10 years, some researchers have found a relationship between very low vitamin D levels and chronic, general pain that doesn’t react to treatment.
Several Americans have low vitamin D. A study available in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2009 revealed that vitamin D levels have dropped among all U.S. ages, races, and ethnic crowds over the previous two decades.
However does not consuming sufficient vitamin D cause pain? That’s not yet clear. But here’s anything you need to know about vitamin D and chronic pain.
Enhancing Vitamin D, Assisting Pain
Greg Plotnikoff, MD, senior consultant with the Allina Center for Health Care Innovations in Minnesota, still recalls the woman in her 40s who told him that he was the 30th physician she’d seen.
Twelve of the previous physicians had told her she was crazy, says Plotnikoff, previously an assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the University Of Minnesota Medical School. She had faintness, achiness, and tiredness, three sheets worth of symptoms. Physicians had offered her antidepressants and seizure prescriptions and all types of things that didn’t work. I tested her vitamin D levels and they came back hardly calculable.
After six months on an aggressive, high dose medication vitamin D replacement, the woman could cross off every symptom on her three sheet list. ‘I knew I wasn’t crazy’ Plotnikoff says she told him.
That’s just one lady. Her example doesn’t mean vitamin D will remove pain for everybody.
However, Plotnikoff published a study in 2003 on 150 people in Minneapolis who approached to a community health clinic complaining of chronic pain. Almost all of them, 93%, had very low vitamin D levels.
Vitamin D blood levels of 30-40 ng/mL are measured perfect. The normal level in Plotnikoff’s study was about 12, and some individuals had vitamin D levels so little they were unnoticeable.
The group with the lowermost levels of vitamin D were white women of motherhood stage, Plotnikoff says. Most of them were discharged by their doctors as unhappy or whiners. They credited their pain to an incapability to cope with stress. But once we refilled their vitamin D, these people said, they have got their lives back.
Plotnikoff records that vitamin D is a hormone. Every tissue in our bodies has vitamin D receptors, containing skeletons, muscles, immune cells, and brain cells.
And in March 2009, researchers at the Mayo Clinic published a study displaying that patients with insufficient vitamin D levels who were taking narcotic pain drugs required almost twice as much medicine to regulate their pain as did patients with sufficient D levels
Jury Still Out
But extra studies have revealed no link between vitamin D and chronic pain, and a research review published in January 2010 revealed that the evidence on the subject is indecisive.
“It would be good if vitamin D worked for chronic pain. It would propose a low cost and modest treatment with well-known and perhaps limited adverse effects,” Sebastian Straube, MD, PhD, tells WebMD in an email. Straube is a physician-scientist at Germany’s University of Göttingen and headed the research review, published in the Cochrane Library.
But it hasn’t been confirmed that enhancing your vitamin D level will remove your pain.
“Looking at all the accessible proof, the connection is not conclusive,” Straube says. “As far as treatment studies are concerned, we found an unusual difference in study result between randomized double blind trials that by virtue of their study strategy reduce prejudice, and other (non-double blind) studies that are more inclined to to prejudice. The later mostly do propose an advantageous outcome of vitamin D treatment; the former mostly don’t.”
Plotnikoff says that there is no proof from randomized, organized trials that refilling vitamin D levels will cure chronic pain. “But it doesn’t hurt to do it,” he notes.
So if you’ve got chronic pain, it can’t hurt to inquire your physician to check your vitamin D levels. “I believe this is completely medically specified, and it should be the standard of care for everyone with chronic, nonspecific musculoskeletal pain,” Plotnikoff says.
“Considering that establishing the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of vitamin D in chronic painful conditions is a clinically important question, there is rather little high-quality evidence on this topic,” Straube says. “At present, we do not think the evidence in this area is of sufficient quality to guide clinical practice. There obviously is a necessity for additional and improved studies in the future.”
If you have severe vitamin D deficiency, any efforts to improve your D levels should be done by checking with your physician. Too much vitamin D can be hazardous and lead to an extra buildup of calcium in your blood, which can lead to kidney stones.
Reference:
Reproduced Version of Chronic Pain: Does Vitamin D Help? By Gina Shaw via WebMD
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