The prevalence of vitamin D deficiency is alarming high

Abstract

Dear Editor With great interest, we read the recently published article by Zaher Khazaei and colleagues entitled “Vitamin D deficiency in healthy people and its relationship with gender and age” in this journal (1). In this study, they measured serum vitamin D levels in a group of Iranian healthy individuals (102 participants) to evaluate the relationship between serum 25-hydroxy vitamin D with gender and age of participants (1). The results of the study showed that vitamin D level is lower than 20 ng/mL in a significant percentage of healthy individuals (73%) which was considered as vitamin D deficiency. The levels of vitamin D in 18% of participants were between 20.1 to 29.9 ng/mL which were interpreted as a marginal deficiency. Therefore according to the results of this study, only 9% of the healthy individuals had normal vitamin D level and the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency among Iranian healthy individuals was alarming high (1). Similar to the results of Khazaei et al study, the results of other investigations which have performed in some other Asian countries like India and Pakistan showed that majority of people in these countries had severe vitamin D deficiency. As an example, Rasul Khan and colleagues evaluated vitamin D status in patients presenting with a complaint of easy fatigability at a medical outpatient clinic. They showed that 92% of participants had low vitamin D levels. Vitamin D status was in the normal range in only 8% of the patients in the study by Rasul Khan et al (2). A similar percentage (89.3%) of low vitamin D levels was also recorded from Northern Pakistan in the study by Mufti et al (3). Although some data from Saudi Arabia showed that the Saudi population has better vitamin D status as compared to the above studies, however the other data from Saudi Arabia also revealed that majority of the patients had low vitamin D levels (4). As an example, Mirza et al evaluated vitamin D status in individuals with body aches at an outpatient department in Dammam, Saudi Arabia Implication for health policy/practice/research/medical education The prevalence of vitamin D deficiency is alarming high in the world and therefore specialists and general physicians have to be more educated about the causes of vitamin D deficiency.