Overview

Vitamin D is a food your body needs for building and maintaining healthy bones. That's considering your body can only absorb calcium, the primary component of os, when vitamin D is nowadays. Vitamin D as well regulates many other cellular functions in your body. Its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and neuroprotective backdrop back up immune health, muscle role and encephalon cell activity.

Vitamin D isn't naturally constitute in many foods, but you tin can become it from fortified milk, fortified cereal, and fat fish such as salmon, mackerel and sardines. Your body too makes vitamin D when direct sunlight converts a chemic in your skin into an active class of the vitamin (calciferol).

The amount of vitamin D your skin makes depends on many factors, including the time of day, season, latitude and your skin pigmentation. Depending on where you live and your lifestyle, vitamin D production might decrease or be completely absent during the wintertime months. Sunscreen, while important to prevent peel cancer, also can decrease vitamin D production.

Many older adults don't get regular exposure to sunlight and have problem absorbing vitamin D. If your physician suspects you lot're non getting enough vitamin D, a uncomplicated blood test can cheque the levels of this vitamin in your blood.

Taking a multivitamin with vitamin D may help improve bone health. The recommended daily amount of vitamin D is 400 international units (IU) for children upwardly to historic period 12 months, 600 IU for people ages i to seventy years, and 800 IU for people over 70 years.

Testify

Research on vitamin D use for specific conditions shows:

  • Cancer. Findings on the benefits of vitamin D for cancer prevention are mixed. More studies are needed to decide whether vitamin D supplementation may reduce the risk of certain cancers.
  • Cerebral health. Enquiry shows that low levels of vitamin D in the blood are associated with cognitive reject. All the same, more studies are needed to make up one's mind the benefits of vitamin D supplementation for cognitive wellness.
  • Inherited bone disorders. Vitamin D supplements can be used to help treat inherited disorders resulting from an inability to absorb or process vitamin D, such as familial hypophosphatemia.
  • Multiple sclerosis. Research suggests that long-term vitamin D supplementation reduces the risk of multiple sclerosis.
  • Osteomalacia. Vitamin D supplements are used to care for adults with severe vitamin D deficiency, resulting in loss of bone mineral content, bone pain, musculus weakness and soft basic (osteomalacia).
  • Osteoporosis. Studies suggest that people who get enough vitamin D and calcium in their diets tin can tiresome os mineral loss, help prevent osteoporosis and reduce bone fractures. Ask your doc if y'all need a calcium and vitamin D supplement to foreclose or treat osteoporosis.
  • Psoriasis. Applying vitamin D or a topical grooming that contains a vitamin D compound called calcipotriene to the skin can treat plaque-type psoriasis in some people.
  • Rickets. This rare status develops in children with vitamin D deficiency. Supplementing with vitamin D tin can prevent and care for the problem.

Our accept

Green light: Generally safe

By and large safe

Without vitamin D your bones can become soft, thin and brittle. Insufficient vitamin D is likewise continued to osteoporosis. If you don't get enough vitamin D through sunlight or dietary sources, yous might need vitamin D supplements.

Safety and side effects

Taken in appropriate doses, vitamin D is mostly considered safe.

However, taking too much vitamin D in the course of supplements can be harmful. Children historic period ix years and older, adults, and pregnant and breastfeeding women who take more than than 4,000 IU a 24-hour interval of vitamin D might experience:

  • Nausea and vomiting
  • Poor ambition and weight loss
  • Constipation
  • Weakness
  • Confusion and disorientation
  • Heart rhythm bug
  • Kidney stones and kidney damage

Interactions

Possible interactions include:

  • Aluminum. Taking vitamin D and aluminum-containing phosphate binders, which may be used to care for loftier serum phosphate levels in people with chronic kidney disease, might cause harmful levels of aluminum in people with kidney failure in the long term.
  • Anticonvulsants. The anticonvulsants phenobarbital and phenytoin (Dilantin, Phenytek) increment the breakup of vitamin D and reduce calcium absorption.
  • Atorvastatin (Lipitor). Taking vitamin D might affect the fashion your torso processes this cholesterol drug.
  • Calcipotriene (Dovonex, Sorilux). Don't take vitamin D with this psoriasis drug. The combination might increment the run a risk of likewise much calcium in the claret (hypercalcemia).
  • Cholestyramine (Prevalite). Taking vitamin D with this cholesterol-lowering drug can reduce your assimilation of vitamin D.
  • Cytochrome P-450 3A4 (CYP3A4) substrates. Apply vitamin D cautiously if y'all're taking drugs processed past these enzymes.
  • Digoxin (Lanoxin). Avoid taking high doses of vitamin D with this center medication. High doses of vitamin D tin can cause hypercalcemia, which increases the risk of fatal heart problems with digoxin.
  • Diltiazem (Cardizem, Tiazac, others). Avoid taking high doses of vitamin D with this blood pressure drug. High doses of vitamin D can cause hypercalcemia, which might reduce the drug's effectiveness.
  • Orlistat (Xenical, Alli). Taking this weight-loss drug can reduce your absorption of vitamin D.
  • Thiazide diuretics. Taking these blood pressure level drugs with vitamin D increases your risk of hypercalcemia.
  • Steroids. Taking steroid mediations such every bit prednisone can reduce calcium assimilation and impair your trunk'southward processing of vitamin D.
  • Stimulant laxatives. Long-term use of loftier doses of stimulant laxatives can reduce vitamin D and calcium absorption.
  • Verapamil (Verelan, Calan SR). Taking high doses of vitamin D with this blood pressure drug can cause hypercalcemia, and might also reduce the effectiveness of verapamil.

From Mayo Clinic to your inbox

Sign upwards for free, and stay up to engagement on research advancements, health tips and current wellness topics, like COVID-19, plus expertise on managing health.

To provide you with the near relevant and helpful information, and sympathise which information is beneficial, nosotros may combine your email and website usage data with other information we accept near you. If you lot are a Mayo Clinic patient, this could include protected health information. If we combine this information with your protected health information, nosotros volition care for all of that information as protected wellness information and will only use or disclose that information as set along in our detect of privacy practices. Y'all may opt-out of electronic mail communications at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link in the email.

Feb. 09, 2021