January 29, 2016 – MS Practice

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Anchor lead: Should everyone with MS be taking high dose vitamin D? Elizabeth Tracey reports

High dose vitamin D was able to reduce inflammation in people with multiple sclerosis, a recent study by Peter Calabresi, an MS expert, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins has shown.  Yet because the study was only six months long and designed to address safety and tolerability, Calabresi says the treatment is not ready for prime time.

Calabresi: One of the questions that comes up frequently is what do we do now clinically for our patients?  We do test everyone for vitamin D deficiency and if someone is extremely low it makes sense to bring them up into the normal levels but it’s always bothered me that we don’t have any good data to know how much is enough, and this study suggested that just getting people up into the sufficient range, which in this country is considered in the thirties or forties, might not be enough and that the patients who got levels at fifty or over were the ones who seemed to demonstrate more of an immune effect.   :32

Calabresi says everyone with MS should talk with their provider about their own vitamin D levels.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.