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Vitamin D deficiency may heighten risk for allergy, asthma in obese children
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SAN FRANCISCO — The risk for asthma and allergy in obese children may be higher due to vitamin D deficiency, according to study results presented at ENDO 2013.
“Vitamin D is activated by immune cells and has anti-inflammatory and anti-allergy properties,” Candace S. Percival, MD, a pediatric endocrinology fellow at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., said during a press conference.
Candace S. Percival
Percival also noted, however, that vitamin D deficiency is very common in the obese population. Additionally, in obesity, there are changes in adipokines as well as changes in the immune system, she said.
To further explore the relationship between obesity, vitamin D, adipokines and risk for allergy in children, Percival and colleagues conducted an observational, cross-sectional study of overweight or obese (n=54) and normal weight (n=32) participants aged 10 to 18 years. All were vitamin D insufficient, as defined by serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D. Immunoglobulin E (IgE) was measured in 19 overweight or obese and 20 normal weight participants, and cytokines — specifically interleukin (IL) 4, 6, 10 and 13 and interferon-gamma — were assessed in 17 overweight or obese and 19 normal weight participants.
“Our results demonstrated that the more obese an individual adolescent was, the more likely they were to have a biochemical allergy profile,” Percival said.
The researchers found that BMI z score positively correlated with leptin (P<.001) and negatively correlated with adiponectin (P=.007) and vitamin D (P<.001). Results also revealed positive correlations between BMI z score and IgE (P=.045), IL-6 (P=.013) and IL-13 (P=.023). No correlation was noted between IL-4 and BMI z score, leptin or adiponectin.
Vitamin D also appeared to have a significant role in these associations, according to Percival, who noted that, in analyses controlling for vitamin D deficiency, the statistically significant correlations disappeared.
“In our population, we found that the allergic profile was indeed increased in obese adolescents,” Percival said. “We also demonstrated that vitamin D was a dependent co-factor for the adolescent having this allergy profile. We showed that the increased BMI was correlated with vitamin D deficiency. We already know that vitamin D has properties that are anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic on the immune system, and therefore, this makes us wonder if vitamin D may be a mediator of the increased risk for allergy in the setting of obesity.” – by Melissa Foster
For more information:
Percival CS. #OR51-5. Presented at: The Endocrine Society Annual Meeting and Expo; June 15-18, 2013; San Francisco.
Perspective
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Henry Anhalt, DO, FAAP
I’d like to know more about vitamin D deficiency. I think the work that Dr. Percival and others are doing will hopefully help us understand more and unlock some of that information, but it’s a very vexing problem, especially since we don’t have standardization. We’re better now, but there are still questions about standardizing vitamin D assays, having consensus about how much to replace, the cause, including the question of whether all vitamin D deficiency is the same, and so on. And these results provide us with another angle to explore. If somebody could tie all the loose pieces together about vitamin D deficiency, I think it’ll be really interesting both at the basic science level as well as in the clinic. This is a primary for translational research because if we can get some of the basic science and then translate that to clinical work, that would be great.
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