Why Not Take Vitamin D3?

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Therapeutic Effect of Vitamin D Supplementation in a Pilot Study of Crohn’s Patients
Clinical and Translational Gastroenterology (2013) 4, e33; doi:10.1038/ctg.2013.1, Published online 18 April 2013
Linlin Yang PhD1, Veronika Weaver1, Jill P Smith MD2, Sandra Bingaman RN2, Terryl J Hartman MPH/PhD3 and Margherita T Cantorna PhD1
1 Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Science, Center for Molecular Immunology and Infectious Disease, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
2 Department of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania, USA
3 Department of Nutritional Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
Correspondence: MT Cantorna, Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences, The Center for Molecular Immunology and Infectious Disease, 115 Henning Building, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA.
Received 28 June 2012; Revised 3 December 2012; Accepted 18 January 2013

OBJECTIVES: Low vitamin D status may be associated with Crohn’s disease. A pilot study was performed in patients with mild-to-moderate Crohn’s disease to determine the dose of vitamin D needed to raise serum vitamin D levels above 40 ng/ml.

METHODS: Patients were evaluated for severity of symptoms using the Crohn’s disease activity index (CDAI) and patients with mild-to-moderate (150–400 CDAI scores) Crohn’s disease were entered into the study (n=18). Vitamin D3 oral therapy was initiated at 1,000 IU/d and after 2 weeks, the dose was escalated incrementally until patients’ serum concentrations reached 40 ng/ml 25(OH)D3 or they were taking 5,000 IU/d. Patients continued on the vitamin D supplements for 24 weeks. CDAI, quality of life measures, bone mineral density, dietary analyses, cytokines, parathyroid hormone, calcium, and several other laboratory measurements were evaluated at baseline and after 24 weeks supplementation.

RESULTS: Fourteen of eighteen patients required the maximal vitamin D supplement of 5,000 IU/d. Vitamin D oral supplementation significantly increased serum 25(OH)D3 levels from 16±10 ng/ml to 45±19 ng/ml (P<0.0001) and reduced the unadjusted mean CDAI scores by 112±81 points from 230±74 to 118±66 (P<0.0001).
Quality-of-life scores also improved following vitamin D supplementation (P=0.0004). No significant changes in cytokine or other laboratory measures were observed.

CONCLUSIONS:
Twenty-four weeks supplementation with up to 5,000 IU/d vitamin D3 effectively raised serum 25(OH)D3 and reduced CDAI scores in a small cohort of Crohn’s patients suggesting that restoration of normal vitamin D serum levels may be useful in the management of patients with mild–moderate Crohn’s disease.

There are several more studies on treating Crohn's with vitamin D3 at the Vitamin D Wiki website...

Crohn's disease helped when vitamin D level raised above 30 ng – RCT Feb 2015

VitaminDWiki Summary and comment

8 of the 12 participants got to a level > 30 ng in 3 months in winter
Many disease trials using vitamin D supplementation find 40 ng benefits
are much better than those at 30 ng
PDF noted that results were better at 40 ng, but they did not have enough
participants getting to that level to make statistically significant conclusions
Probably have gotten much better results if get > 40 ng by one or more of
the following

Used a form of vitamin D designed for use with poor gut function
Used more IU/day - say >3,000 IU
Used a loading dose
Used cofactors – such as Vitamin K2
Trial lasting more than 3 months

See also VitaminDWiki

Crohn’s helped by 5000 IU vitamin D – April 2013
Crohn’s disease deficient in vitamin K – IBD deficient in vitamins K and D – April 2011
Overview Gut and vitamin D
Search VitaminDWiki for Crohn's 319 items as of Dec 2014
Search VitaminDWiki for Martineau (one of the authors) 124 items as of Feb 2015
Proof that Vitamin D Works this study is the 51st proof

Download the PDF from VitaminDWiki.

So here's the question... 35 to 42 cents a day for vitamin D3 and the cofactors with all kinds of health benefits and no adverse side effects... or $2300 a week for two shots of Humira?

A better question... What is your 25(OH)D serum concentration? If you don't know... you should. It's a simple blood test your doctor can order or you can get a home blood spot test and do it your self. Grassrootshealth offers it for $65... no Rx needed.

If you do decide you need vitamin D3, you'll also need the vitamin D3 cofactors. They include magnesium, zinc, boron, vitamin A (retinol), and vitamin K2 (MK4 and MK7). The following table illustrates the supplements and doses:

The simple clutch of off the shelf supplements needed to meet the above requirements are shown in the photo below:

As shown, this is a 6 month supply costing around 40 cents a day depending where you buy them... Costco carries all but the Super K with advanced K2 complex... You can buy it at LEF, iherb or amazon dot com. The Mature Multi contains most of the basic vitamin D3 cofactors and a lot more vitamins and minerals we all need..

Take care,

V/R, Batch
I'm not a troll

 

[nogutsnoglory]

It's not quite so simple or all the doctors and pharma would be out of business. Vitamin D3 is excellent for everyone and definitely for us but I've been supplementing at high doses for 2-3 years and I still very much need remicade.

 

[Batch]

Nogutsnoglory,

Thank you for the comments… Coming from a Moderator makes them very special, as you wouldn’t be in that position without years of experience on this forum.

Before I continue I need to make the following obligatory disclosure that I am not a doctor and that the following post is for information purposes only. Discuss the contents of this post with your PCP or gastroenterologist as appropriate whoever is most familiar with your overall medical condition and currently prescribed medications before asking for a lab test of your 25(OH)D and starting the suggested regimen of vitamin D3 and the cofactors.

Nogutsnoglory, you’ve made three excellent points… and I cannot argue them from your perspective except to say… It could be that simple… Unfortunately the mindset and prevailing standards of care protocols used by physicians and gastroenterologists to treat CD and UC prevent it from being so… Big Pharma plays an even more significant role in preventing the use of alternatives like vitamin D3 in treating these disorders…

As a cluster headache (CH) sufferer (CH’er), I’ve experienced the same comments from members of our cluster headache forum… However, most of that started changing in December of 2010 when I introduced the anti-inflammatory regimen with 10,000 IU/day vitamin D3 and the cofactors… and started posting about my experiences in taking it.

By early 2011 the members of our forum who started this regimen began posting it was working and many were completely CH pain free. "It can't be that simple" was a common theme of many posts... yet it was... and still is... just that simple. Today over four years since my initial post, over 600 members and guests of our CH forum have stared this regimen. 83% of them have experienced a significant reduction in the frequency, severity and duration of their CH. 60% report a lasting pain free response as long as they stay on this regimen.

The initial thread has averaged over 180 views a day since then and it broke the view counter at 670,000 views last November. Once I address your concerns, I think you’ll see that taking vitamin D3 and the cofactors to help control CD and UC can be that simple… Moreover, it won’t interfere with your present course of treatments, they can be taken together. I need to be clear this regimen is not a cure... I'm still a chronic CH'er and I'll get hit if I stop taking this regimen... What I do enjoy while taking this regimen is a wonderful quality of life I never thought possible when I was first diagnosed with CH.

Regarding physicians, mindsets and prevailing standards of care protocols... For starters most physicians and gastroenterologists are totally ignorant of the benefits of vitamin D3 beyond building bone mineral density. Too many are also unaware that taking vitamin D3 at pharmacological doses, i.e., ≥ 4,000 to 10,000 IU/day or higher along with the vitamin D3 cofactors has many other health benefits that include building a stronger immune system. There’s a number of reason why they’re well behind the time when it comes to the health benefits of vitamin D3 and the role it could play in controlling CD, UC and the other IBD.

Physicians are taught in medical school to use the prevailing Standards of Care Practice Guidelines with recommended pharmaceuticals in treating patients with our respective disorders… Yes, there are Standards of Care Practice Guidelines for treating CH as well…

These recommended treatments are usually generated by a group or committees of “experts” based on medical evidence of safety and efficacy obtained from gold standard, randomized, placebo controlled, clinical trials, (RCT). Physicians are also told to adhere to the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) for vitamins and minerals, developed by the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

Let’s take Remicade (Infliximab) as an example. I’ve spent the last three days reviewing Standards of Care Recommended Treatment Guidelines for CD and UC from the American College of Gastroenterology, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK, Johns Hopkins and GUT from the British Society of Gastroenterology (BSG).

All of these standards of care practice guidelines state CD is a chronic inflammatory disorder that is neither medically nor surgically “curable.” They adhere to the same basic litany of treatments depending on the disease location, disease severity and disease-associated complications with therapeutic approaches individualized according to the symptomatic response and tolerance to medical intervention.

The lists of pharmaceuticals recommended in these guidelines are generated by committees of experts and categorize in order as Grade A: Evidence from multiple well designed randomized (therapeutic) or cohort (descriptive) controlled trials, each involving a number of participants to be of sufficient statistical power. Grade B: Evidence from at least one large well-designed clinical trial with or without randomization, from cohort or case–control analytic studies, or well-designed meta-analysis. And Grade C: Evidence based on clinical experience, descriptive studies, or reports of expert committees.

The common theme of these treatments is they only address the symptoms of CD, UC. There’s no attempt to address the underlying autoimmunity. This condition arises when cells of the immune system loose their IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) capability and start attacking friendly cells.

So lets take infliximab as an example… It’s classified as a chimeric monoclonal antibody… In other words, an antibody genetically engineered with a combination of mouse and human DNA.

As a side note, I endured a year of treatment with another MAB, daclizumab. The accepted naming convention for biologics like monoclonal antibodies adds “mab” to the end of the biologic’s name to delineate their general function. Daclizumab is typically used to prevent rejection in organ transplantation. In my case it was used to treat another autoimmune disorder where inflammation was affecting my retina and they were trying to reject me…

Daclizumab is classified as a “Humanized” monoclonal antibody sourced from mouse DNA and treated with recombinant DNA techniques to add enough human DNA to make it viable in human serum.

I don’t know about you, but it gave me a funny feeling knowing I had mouse DNA running around in my body… My craving for cheese hasn’t changed… but my whiskers grow faster and I scurry around a lot more at night… However, at age 70, the additional scurrying around is usually from the bed to the bathroom and back to bed.

Getting back to infliximab… It’s method of action in treating CD and UC causes it to bind to tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), a key part of autoimmune diseases and inhibit its normal activity. TNF-α is a chemical messenger a.k.a. a cytokine that normally plays a key role in signaling the human immune system cells into action.

In a normal immune system, TNF-α enables macrophages, specialized large white blood cells that run around the body like a hungry packman army, eating cell fragments, tumor cells as well as harmful bacteria and virus to keep us free of infections and disease. Unfortunately in an autoimmune disease, TNF-α has lost its IFF capability so the macrophages attack friendly cells… In the case of CD and UC, they attack cells lining the GI tract.

The case for taking vitamin D3 is different than taking a MAB. Instead of disabling the offending TFN-α with infliximab, vitamin D3 enables genetic expression… In simple terms, genetic expression is made possible by the active hormonal form of vitamin D3 that attaches directly to vitamin D3 receptors on genes. Once this has happened, genetic expression essentially unlocks the cell’s genetic library of instructions and this enables the cells to execute a number of actions that include replicating, differentiating, up-regulating or down-regulating the production of essential peptides and chemicals, and cell death… What we would hope happens to cancer and other tumor cells.

Where infliximab inhibits TFN-α from its normal activity in treating CD, the limited data suggest, in simple terms, vitamin D3 and genetic expression send the macrophages back to school to relearn what they were supposed to do in a normal immune system so TFN-α functions with a normal IFF capability. It should be of interest that a search of available open source literature revealed there are no adverse interactions listed between infliximab and vitamin D3.

Is there clinical evidence of efficacy in treating CD with vitamin D3? Yes. In a 2013 clinical trial (Interventional - open label), conducted at Penn State titled: Vitamin D Supplementation in Crohn's Patients (CTSA), 18 CD subjects were given 4000 IU/day vitamin D3. At six months their 25(OH)D serum concentration had increased from a baseline average of 16 ng/mL (clearly vitamin D3 deficient) to 45 ng/mL. The following chart illustrates the change in Crohn's Disease Ativity Index from baseline to six months:

It should be noted that there were no vitamin D3 cofactors used and the vitamin D3 dose was less than half that suggested in the anti-inflammatory regimen.

In all of these treatment guidelines, vitamin D is only mentioned in passing as a treatment for loss of bone mineral density due to the disease preventing absorption of vitamin D3 in the gut or treatments with corticosteroids, which inhibit its method of action… Nowhere in these Standards of Care practice guidelines is vitamin D3 used as a mainstream or adjunct treatment for CD or UC.

This is where another of the problems with doctors arises… In too many cases, the Standards of Care recommended treatments and DRIs are developed by groups and committees of “experts” some of whom have direct ties to Big Pharma or who are actually employed by Big Pharma. Accordingly, it’s extremely rare to find any Standards of Care recommended treatments that involve the use of over the counter, USP vitamins and minerals as a primary intervention. There’s a good reason for this… USP vitamins and minerals cannot be patented… Moreover, the IOM consistently low-balls the RDIs (sets lower doses) for vitamins like vitamin D3.

It gets even worse… Big Pharma sales representatives are in constant contact with physicians providing them with the latest research on drugs pending FDA approval, and follow-on studies of pharmaceuticals already approved by the FDA. It’s also a very common practice for Big Pharma sales reps to make frequent visits with physicians where they drop off “samples” of the more expensive pharmaceuticals for the physicians to try on their patients.

In addition, Big Pharma frequently sponsors the organizations that provide CME (continuing medical education) that are required in nearly all states to maintain a license to practice medicine.

There are also too many physicians who accept all expense paid trips by Big Pharma to wonderful vacation sites to attend CME training, or they’re paid by Big Pharma to make presentations to other physicians and patient communities on the efficacy of sponsored pharmaceuticals.

If you doubt these last statements, Google “Dollars for Doctors – ProPublica” and plug in names of physicians at the top of the pecking order in treating CD and UC … I think you’ll be surprised at the amount of money they receive from Big Pharma…

To be fair, it’s a fact of life that major RCTs cannot be conducted unless there’s a noted physician serving as the Principal Investigator on these clinical trials… and for the most part, the majority of them are very objective in analyzing the results.

The other big roadblock in a greater awareness of the benefits of vitamin D3 is based on the fact that Big Pharma has been conducting a major campaign to discredit and marginalize the benefits of vitamin D3 for many years… They frequently sponsor RCTs where the dose of vitamins is at or below the RDI set by the IOM… In too many cases, this results in a nul hypothesis where the placebo is just as effective as the low dose of vitamin D3.

The real money coming from Big Pharma goes to political action committees through their lobbyists on K street and in the form of direct contributions. With the exception of the few physicians in the Senate and House, the rest are blithering idiots when it comes to matters of health… but they sure know how to accept contributions from Big Pharma… The following chart tells part of the story:

The rest of the story comes in the “pro quo,” where politicians put forward legislation (carefully crafted by Big Pharma and their lobbyists) to ensure the legislative deck is stacked in Big Pharma’s favor. Big Pharma’s influence in Congress has already made it against the law for nutraceutical companies, (manufacturers of branded vitamin and mineral nutritional supplements), to advertise any measure of efficacy of their products in treating any medical condition.

What is even more disturbing is there are a number of members of Congress like Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and State Attorney Generals like New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who have supported a major crusade against dietary supplements. Granted most of what they’re targeting are herbal supplements and a few of them are bad, but that responsibility falls on the FDA, not a bunch of politicians with a different agenda fueled by Big Pharma. It's highly probable that any legislation in this area that's passed, will have loopholes that will enable the restriction of vitamin D3 supplements to doses no higher than 1,000 IU per capsule. If you think this can't happen, ask your members in Canada, the UK and most of the EU. It has already happened there.

Why would they do that you ask? Simple… Big Pharma wants to protect their bottom line profits counted in tens of billions of dollars a year selling patented pharmaceuticals and biologics like Remicade or Humira that can cost upwards $4,300 for a two-shot kit according to Drugs dot com, rather than have you take over the counter vitamins and minerals… All you need to do is look at the return on investment (ROI) for money spent lobbying Congress to protect their drug pricing practices…

In another amazing example, Big Pharma and their stooges at the American Heart Association have perpetrated the single biggest medical hoax in history with the cholesterol myth and that people with high cholesterol levels need to take life-long doses of statins…

Fortunately, there are a growing number of valid, peer-reviewed studies proving statins do not improve longevity… Some of these studies conclude just the opposite of the myth, and that is we can live very normal and long lasting lives without statins and with cholesterol levels much higher than the recent recommended cutoff put out by the AHA and ACC that will put an estimated 13 million more people on statins…

The truth is the real killer in terms of cardio vascular disease, obesity and diabetes is too much sugar, too much high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and the S.A.D. (the Standard American Diet)…

One of Big Pharma’s single largest targets is vitamin D3… They’ve intentionally downplayed the benefits of vitamin D3 knowing full well that a dose of vitamin D3 costing 6 cents a day can be just effective in some cases, and even more so in treating many disorders than the pharmaceutical solution. Moreover, it’s important to note that the many health benefits from taking vitamin D3 come without the onerous adverse side effects of MABs like Humira… Watch any TV add for Humira and count the side effects…

Getting back to the efficacy of taking the anti-inflammatory regimen with 10,000 IU/day vitamin D3 and all the vitamin D3 cofactors in controlling GI tract disorders… It really can be that simple…

Obviously, I’m not suggesting this regimen as a mono-therapy… Vitamin D3 works quite well when taken with a number of pharmaceuticals… and proper diet… In fact, there are very few drug interactions or contraindications associated with this regimen… and no adverse side effects that require medical attention.

Absorption of vitamin D3 is one of the possible problems members of this form might experience… The simple thing to do is ask your PCP or gastroenterologist for the 25(OH)D lab test. If your PCP or gastroenterologist says “OK,” you’ve got a great doctor… If you get a lot of hemming and hawing and your request is denied as being unneeded or silly… red flags should go up! In that case, tell your doctor you may have overdosed on vitamin D3 by taking 600,000 IU in one day… This is actually quite safe as you’ll see later in this post.

It’s important to know your serum concentration of 25(OH)D… Unless they’re presently supplementing with vitamin D3, the safe bet is most members of this forum are vitamin D3 deficient, i.e., a 25(OH)D serum concentration less than 30 ng/mL, (75 nmol/L).

Once you have a baseline 25(OH)D serum concentration, start the anti-inflammatory regimen at 10,000 IU/day and take it for at least a month, then go in for a second lab for 25(OH)D. If the results of this lab test indicate a significant increase in 25(OH)D to 50 ng/mL or higher, your vitamin D3 absorption is adequate. If the gain in 25(OH)D serum concentration is marginal… switch to liquid vitamin D3 drops and take the daily dose sublingual…

Taking vitamin D3 this way allows it to pass directly into the bloodstream through the mucus membranes in the mouth and this bypasses any absorption problems in the GI tract. What you’re shooting for is a 25(OH)D around 80 ng/mL… That requires on average, a vitamin D3 intake of 10,000 IU/day. The following chart illustrates the suggested 25(OH)D serum concentrations suggested by the Vitamin D Council, Grassroots Health and vitamin D3 advocates .

Nogutsnoglory, I’m not here on this forum to sell anything… What I’m trying to do is help members of your forum gain a greater awareness that a regimen of vitamin D3 and its cofactors can have beneficial effects on GI tract disorders and in the process, take advantage of all the other health benefits… All you need to do is go to the Vitamin D Wiki web site and check the column on the left of the home page for a growing list of medical conditions that are either prevented or treated with vitamin D3.

I’d also like to point out what most members of this forum already know… and that is their inflammatory disorders fall under the broader category of autoimmune diseases. What might not be so obvious is CD, UC and the other inflammatory disorders like MS can also be categorized as a genetotrophic disease.

In 1956, Dr. Roger J. Williams, a brilliant biochemist who discovered many of the seven B vitamins, coined the term genetotrophic disease to describe diseases which resulted from genetically determined nutritional metabolic needs not being met by the individual and which result in poor gene expression.

What was so profound and far seeing about genetotrophic diseases is the $3 Billion dollar human genome project that started in 1990, wasn't declare complete until 2003 when they had sequenced and mapped out most of human genome... Moreover, studies in genetic expression, which have proven what was postulated in 1956, didn’t start in earnest until 2004… 48 years after Dr. Williams coined the term…

If you stop and think about it, it’s easy to name a handful of diseases that meet the framework of a genetotrophic disease… Scurvy, rickets, osteomalacia and osteoporosis for starters…

Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C… British sailors used to take crates of limes on long ocean voyages to get the needed vitamin C to prevent scurvy, so were called “Limeys.”

Rickets, osteomalacia and osteoporosis are caused by not enough vitamin D in the diet, not enough exposure to sunlight, which produces vitamin D in the body or malabsorption of vitamin D by the intestines… starting to sound familiar?

The evidence from at least 51 RCTs have pointed out that a lack of vitamin D3 is common in all the GI tract disorders including CD, UC, Celiac and IBS. Most of these same studies have concluded that treatment with vitamin D3 at 4,000 IU/day and higher doses reduce the frequency and severity of outbreaks.

No discussion of vitamin D3 therapy would be complete without covering safety… For starters, in the history of the FDA’s Adverse Reaction Database, there hasn’t been a single death attributed to vitamin D3. In fact, if you’ll Google “deaths attributed to vitamin D3” you’ll find the majority of hits make a causal linkage between premature death and a vitamin D3 deficiency…

Of course there are three studies conducted by the same group at the University of Copenhagen that used junk science on the same database to come up with the reverse J shaped mortality curve… They’ve put out thee studies in as many years that concluded too much vitamin D3 decreases longevity… It’s particularly interesting to note that one of the authors of these three studies is a paid consultant for nearly all of the major pharmaceutical firms.

If you read the these studies carefully, you’ll also find numerous peer reviews that reclama their findings and point out faults in their methods and conclusions… They’re no different than the idiots who came up with the fraudulent junk science hockey stick graph of global warming they obtained by altering the values of their collected data…

Can you take too much vitamin D3? Of course… You can also die from drinking too much water… The simple fact remains the body needs vitamin D3 to the extent it makes its own if you let it… The skin of an adult with a fair complexion can generate 15,000 IU of vitamin D3 in as little as 10 minutes if exposed to the UV-B in mid-day sunlight clad in a bathing suit without any sun block… We may have done that when we were kids on a daily basis during the summer, but how many of us still do that today? My guess is not many… Working for a living and the skin cancer mafia has seen to that.

It turns out that it’s not the dose of vitamin D3 that counts, but rather the dose over time and the resulting serum concentration of 25(OH)D that’s important. The following chart provides a very conservative coverage of safe vitamin D3 doses and durations…

There are a number of gold standard RCTs involving the use of vitamin D3 as a method of intervention for a number of medical conditions that conclude a vitamin D3 dose of 10,000 IU/day is very safe.

This post is already too long and should have been posted as an attachment, but I won’t have that capability until I make a few more posts. In the mean time I thought it important for readers to hear “the rest of the story” as Paul Harvey used to say…

In closing please understand I don't think all physicians are on the take. The majority of them are hardworking professionals with a genuine interest in our health and well being... This post is also not a complete condemnation of Big Pharma. We'd all be dead if it wasn't for many of their life-saving drugs... You just need to understand they're driven more by profit margins at the bottom line than good will. I also want to make it clear that the anti-inflammatory regimen isn't a mono therapy... It can and should be taken with your prescribed medications... Just keep your doctor in the loop.

I’m here to help and I’ll be happy to answer questions on the anti-inflammatory regimen to the best of my ability.

Take care,

V/R, Batch

 

[Batch]

Crohn’s disease deficient in vitamin K – IBD deficient in vitamins K and D – April 2011

Association of vitamin K deficiency with bone metabolism and clinical disease activity in inflammatory bowel disease


Objective
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic inflammatory process in the digestive tract and patients with IBD develop osteopenia. Although vitamins K and D are important for maintaining bone health and inhibiting inflammation, their roles in patients with IBD are not clear. We investigated the roles of vitamins K and D in the bone health and inflammation in patients with IBD.

Methods
Bone mineral density (BMD) of patients with IBD (Crohn’s disease (CD), n = 47, and ulcerative colitis (UC), n = 40) was measured with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Vitamin K and D levels of patients with IBD and healthy volunteers (n = 41) were evaluated by measuring serum undercarboxylated osteocalcin and 1,25 dihydroxyvitamin D, respectively. Clinical activity index was evaluated in patients with CD and UC.

Results
BMD was low in patients with CD and UC. Serum undercarboxylated osteocalcin levels were significantly higher in patients with CD, but not with UC, compared with healthy subjects, indicating that bone vitamin K is insufficient in patients with CD. The levels of undercarboxylated osteocalcin were significantly correlated with the clinical activity index of CD, although they were not correlated with BMD.

The levels of 1,25 dihydroxyvitamin D were significantly lower in patients with CD and UC than in healthy subjects. The levels of 1,25 dihydroxyvitamin D were inversely correlated with BMD in patients with UC and were not correlated with the clinical activity index of CD.

Conclusion
Vitamins K and D are insufficient in patients with IBD. Insufficiency of vitamin K is suggested to be associated with inflammatory processes of CD.

Comment: Recent RCTs have concluded 5,000 to 10,000 IU/day vitamin D3 and a 25(OH)D serum concentration around 80 ng/mL, (200 nmol/L) would improve the favorable response for people with CD and UC even more...

When was the last time you had your 25(OH)D serum concentration tested?

How many of you are taking at least 5,000 IU/day vitamin D3?

Take care,

V/R, Batch

 

[D Bergy]

How much you need depends on how well you absorb the D. I had to take 30,000 iu to get up to a normal range, and even at that dose, it took a while.

I cannot say it had any noticable effect that I could detect. It did not halt the disease either, but things like this are quite individual.

Vitamin K should be used along with D to prevent bone loss and reactions to high doses of D3.
Magnesium should also be supplemented as most are low in it anyway, and it also helps get calcium where it belongs.

Keeping D levels up there has also been shown by a Japanese study to prevent the flu. Far better than any vaccine.

Dan

 

[wild_one353]

Interesting post, not enough references to be persuasive for me though. Yes i take vitamin d and yes it inhibits some symptoms in crohn's. 600,000 iu if vitamin is almost certainly not safe. I think 20,000 IU has been calculated as the maximum that is naturally produced, but even that might be high still. at times I have felt toxic from taking higher then 2000iu, but i dont have diarhea and i was already taking 1000iu for years before raising it.

 

[Batch]

Dan, WildBill,

Thanks, you've made some great responses...

Dan, your points are spot on. The full suite of vitamin D3 cofactors for a daily maintenance dose of 10,000 IU/day vitamin D3 includes: 400 to 600 mg/day magnesium, 10 mg/day zinc, 1 mg/day boron, Vitamin A (retinol) at RDA, and at least 100 mcg vitamin K2. Scroll up to the first post in this thread for a table of supplements and doses as well as the OTC supplements by brand I take to meet the dosing requirements in the table.

In addition, it's also prudent to start a 3-month course of vitamin B 50... That's a tablet formulated with 50 mg each of the seven B vitamins and 400 mg folic acid. This should take care of any deficiencies among the seven B vitamins and it also helps kick start recolonization of friendly colonies of bacteria in the GI tract referred to as the "micro biome."

There's more genetic diversity in the micro biome than in the human genome... The micro biome also plays a significant role in our immune systems... Taking a good probiotic is also a good idea, particularly so after a course of antibiotics that wipe out all bacteria in the GI tract... Fresh sauerkraut and kinche as well as Greek yogurt also help rebuild the human micro biome.

Wild Bill, Regarding the safety of a 600,000 IU dose of vitamin D3... I can show you at least three studies totaling over 100 people who took a single oral 600,000 IU dose of vitamin D3 with no ill effects. Their serum 25D went up by an average of 60 ng/mL on top of their starting serum concentration of 25D. Serum calcium stayed well within its normal reference range, PTH dropped slightly and there was no excess calcium in the urine... Serum and urine creatinine was also normal. You can search for these studies on vitaminDwiki dot com. Enter "600,000 IU" in the search window at the top of the page...

I can also show you 51 links to studies involving people with CD, UC, Celiac and IBS being treated successfully with vitamin D3... Many of these studies illustrate the clear link between IBD and a vitamin D3 and/or a vitamin K2 deficiency...

You can find these RCTs yourself at VitaminDwiki dot com.... Go to the column on the left and scroll down to "Gut" and click on it. You can also use the search window at the top of the page and put in the name of your brand of IBD.

I've recently introduced benadryl to our cluster headache forum as spring is the obvious time for pollen allergies... The dose is 25 mg 4 times a day every 4 to 5 hours... So far I'm batting 1000 in stopping CH among our forum's CH'ers taking the anti-inflammatory regimen but suffering burn through cluster headaches... Most CH'ers are pain free again within 24 hours of starting the benadryl.

As cluster headache and IBD are both inflammatory disorders... benadryl may help IBD sufferers presently having a rough time.

Take care and thanks again for the comments.

V/R, Batch