(Press-News.org) A study conducted in more than 100 Mongolian schoolchildren found that daily treatment with a vitamin D supplement significantly reduced the symptoms of winter-related atopic dermatitis, a type of eczema. Led by a Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) physician, the report in the October issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology supports the results of a preliminary study that showed similar results in a small group of children in Boston.
"While we don't know the exact proportion of patients with atopic dermatitis whose symptoms worsen in the winter, the problem is common," says Carlos Camargo, MD, DrPH, MGH Department of Emergency Medicine. "In this large group of patients, who probably had low levels of vitamin D, taking daily vitamin D supplements – which are inexpensive, safe and widely available – proved to be quite helpful." Camargo led both the earlier Boston pilot study and the current investigation, which was performed in collaboration with investigators from the Health Sciences University of Mongolia.
A chronic inflammatory disorder of the skin, atopic dermatitis is uncomfortable and makes patients more vulnerable to bacterial infection. Symptoms of the disorder – most commonly seen in children – often worsen during wintertime. While controlled administration of ultraviolet light, which can stimulate the production of vitamin D in the skin, is a common treatment for severe atopic dermatitis, the possibility that vitamin D deficiency contributes to the seasonal worsening of symptoms had received little consideration prior to the Boston study. That investigation involved only 11 children but provided preliminary support for the hypothesis.
The current study, conducted in collaboration with the National Dermatology Center in Mongolia, enrolled 107 children, ages 2 to 17, from nine outpatient clinics in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. The participants – all of whom had a history of atopic dermatitis symptoms worsening either during cold weather or around the transition from autumn to winter – were randomly divided into two groups. One group received a daily vitamin D dose of 1000 IU while the other received a placebo – both delivered in odorless, colorless and tasteless drops. Neither the children's parents nor the study investigators knew to which group participants had been assigned.
Standard evaluations of atopic dermatitis symptoms were conducted at the outset of the trial and at the end of the month-long study period, and parents were also asked whether they saw any improvement in their child's condition. At the end of the month, children receiving the vitamin D supplement had an average 29 percent improvement on the primary assessment tool used, compared with 16 percent improvement in the placebo group. Additional assessments – including the report from parents – also showed significantly greater improvement among children receiving vitamin D.
While data gathered at the outset of the study could not determine whether or not participating children were deficient in vitamin D, the authors note that an even larger study of Ulaanbaatar children conducted at the same time found significant vitamin D deficiency in 98 percent of participants, supporting the probability that the children in this study were also deficient. While future studies are needed to assess the value of vitamin D treatment in adults and in children with year-round symptoms, Camargo – a professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School – says that parents of children with symptoms that worsen in the winter should try a vitamin D supplement for a few weeks when symptoms flare to see if it helps. He encourages parents to discuss this study and their plan with their primary care provider.
INFORMATION:
Co-authors of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology report are Davaasambuu Ganmaa, MD, PhD, Kh. Erdenedelger, MD, N. Radnaakhand, MD, PhD, and B. Khandsuren, MD, PhD, Health Sciences University of Mongolia; and Robert Sidbury, MD, Seattle Children's Hospital.
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of more than $785 million and major research centers in HIV/AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine.
As global life expectancy increases, adults want to maintain healthy and active lifestyles well into retirement. In fact, research shows that adults think, feel and behave five to ten years younger than their actual age.1-2 But new findings from a review paper published in Age and Ageing show that approximately one out of three adults age 50 and older suffer from sarcopenia, a condition that could interfere with aging adults' ability to live a full and active life.3
Sarcopenia, as it is known in the medical field, is a condition when a person has progressive loss of ...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass--When someone crumples a sheet of paper, that usually means it's about to be thrown away. But researchers have now found that crumpling a piece of graphene "paper" — a material formed by bonding together layers of the two-dimensional form of carbon — can actually yield new properties that could be useful for creating extremely stretchable supercapacitors to store energy for flexible electronic devices.
The finding is reported in the journal Scientific Reports by MIT's Xuanhe Zhao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental ...
October 3, 2014 – Children who require long-term parenteral nutrition are at risk of a potentially devastating complication called intestinal failure-associated liver disease (IAFLD). The diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of IAFLD are discussed in a new position paper in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, official journal of the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (ESPGHAN) and the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams ...
TORONTO, October 3, 2014 – Ache, agony, distress and pain draw more attention than non-pain related words when it comes to people who suffer from chronic pain, a York University research using state-of-the-art eye-tracking technology has found.
"People suffering from chronic pain pay more frequent and longer attention to pain-related words than individuals who are pain-free," says Samantha Fashler, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Health and the lead author of the study. "Our eye movements — the things we look at — generally reflect what we attend to, and knowing how ...
Previously undiscovered secrets of how human cells interact with a bacterium which causes a serious human disease have been revealed in new research by microbiologists at The University of Nottingham.
The scientists at the University's Centre for Biomolecular Sciences have shed new light on how two proteins found on many human cells are targeted by the human pathogen Neisseria meningitidis which can cause life-threatening meningitis and septicaemia.
The proteins, laminin receptor (LAMR1) and galectin-3 (Gal-3) are found in and on the surface of many human cells. Previous ...
The world's fiber-optic network spans more than 550,000 miles of undersea cable that transmits e-mail, websites, and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or tangle in any part of this network can significantly slow telecommunications around the world.
Now engineers at MIT, along with computer scientists at Columbia University, have developed a method that predicts the pattern of coils and tangles that a cable may form when deployed onto a rigid surface. The research combined laboratory experiments with custom-designed cables, computer-graphics ...
By creating a global database an international consortium of scientists has increased the detailed knowledge of the variation in the cattle genome by several orders of magnitude. The first generation of the new data resource, which will be open access, forms an essential tool for scientists working with cattle genetics and livestock history. The results are published in an article in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Genetics.
It's momentous, says one of the scientists behind the international effort, associate professor Bernt Guldbrandtsen from the Center for ...
A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA have demonstrated a novel automated fabrication process consisting of a three-step sol-gel extrusion, structure freezing and drying, and mechanical drawing process which results in production of highly aligned polymer films. Alignment of molecular chains within polymers is a desirable trait for many applications as it results in superior mechanical and thermal properties in the polymeric materials. Although these highly aligned polymer films (HAPFs) are in demand, previous fabrication ...
When you take a shower and rinse the soap and shampoo off your body, the foam conveniently disappears between your toes and down the drain. Have you ever thought about what happens to the surfactants afterwards? Whether they seep into the groundwater, lakes and streams, where they could pose a risk to fish and frogs?
Not likely. This is shown in a new and very comprehensive report of the potential impact on the environment of the enormous amounts of common surfactants used day in and day out by consumers all over the world.
"We humans use several million tons of ...
Microfluidic tools for precision measurements of cell migration speed reveal that migratory speed of individual cells changes stochastically from parent cells to their descendants, while the average speed of the cell population remains constant through successive generations.
A team of researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston has developed technologies for precision measurement of cell migration speed before and applied the new tool to study the variations of migration speed in population of cancer cells. This tool enabled ...
