Dr. Joshua Miller, a professor of nutritional sciences at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, found that people with low levels of vitamin D experienced rates of cognitive decline at a much faster pace than people with adequate vitamin D status.
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If you want strong bones, vitamin D (and calcium) is known to be rather beneficial, but according to new evidence, the supplement might also have an active role in protecting the brain against cognitive decline. About 33 percent of study participants were diagnosed with a minor cognitive impairment, while slightly over 17 percent had a full-fledged diagnosis of dementia.
“Even if doing so proves to not be effective, there’s still very low health risk to doing it”, he said.
Estimates show that nearly 50 % Americans over 65 years of age lack sufficient levels of vitamin D. Also, non-whites are the ones most likely to have low levels. Findings suggest that reduced levels of vitamin D are related to faster decline in cognitive functions among older adults, which puts them at greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
People with lower levels of vitamin D also had lower scores on certain memory and executive function tests.
According to a report from CTV News, getting a healthy dose of vitamin D each day can keep people in their 60s and up feeling more active.
The large, longitudinal study was conducted in almost 400 racially and ethnically diverse men and women in Northern California participating in longitudinal research at the Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Sacramento.
Researchers studied 382 older adults with an average age of 75.
While people with darker skin are more prone to have low amounts of vitamin D, there was no difference in the rates of cognitive decrease based exclusively on racial or ethnic factors. While dementia is the general term used for severe mental ability decline, Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form. While this study found that people with low levels of vitamin D experience faster mental decline, we await the results of large-scale clinical trials to confirm whether there is a direct link between vitamin D and memory problems.
This study was published September 14 in the journal JAMA Neurology. The patients with dementia had the lowest vitamin D levels when compared to the other groups.
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Usually, vitamin D supplementation is not a requirement because the skin automatically processes the vitamin when it is exposed to sunlight. The researchers measured serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-OHD) in order to assess the participants’ level of vitamin D. They defined less than 12 ng/mL as deficient, 12 to less than 20 ng/mL as insufficient, and 20 to less than 50 ng/mL as adequate.
