Vitamin D tablets may help reduce asthma attacks, review finds

Severe asthma attacks have not been studied to the same extent. Further vitamin D trials in children and in adults with severe asthma are needed to find out whether these patient groups will also benefit.

“Vitamin D, or the sunshine vitamin, as well as enhancing bone development, helps the development of at least 35 other tissues and white blood cells”, said lead author Dr. Adrian Martineau.

Professor Adrian Martineau, the Cochrane Review’s lead author from Queen Mary University of London, said asthma is a “rising problem” in the United Kingdom, with one out of 11 people receiving treatment for it every day.

A major review, involving almost 1,100 patients, found that people who took the supplements alongside their normal medication saw the risk of a severe attack fall from 6 per cent to 3 per cent.

While the underlying causes of asthma remain unclear, symptoms of asthma – such as wheezing, shortness of breath, coughing, and chest pain and tightness – can be triggered by exposure to allergens and irritants.

‘We don’t know whether these heightened dosages will benefit all asthma patients or just those who already have low levels of vitamin D.

Low levels of vitamin D have been suspected as increasing the risk for asthma attacks, and a new review of studies suggested the vitamin can significantly reduce attacks among some groups of patients.

Soaking in the sunlight or popping a vitamin D supplement won’t worsen your asthma symptoms, but doing either doesn’t mean you should leave your emergency inhaler at home.

They examined results of trials involving 435 children and 658 adults from the UK, Canada, India, Japan, Poland and the US. The studies lasted for a period of six to 12 months.

As such, researchers have increasingly investigated whether vitamin D supplementation might benefit asthma patients. Most of the participants had mild to restrained asthma with a smaller number having severe asthma. These results are based largely on trials in adults. A treatment that can help people avoid having an asthma attack, especially a severe attack that needs hospital treatment, has always been an aim of asthma research. The supplements cut the frequency of attacks too, with cases needing steroid treatment falling from one per person every two or so years, to one every four years. Two trials in more than 2,500 people showed that a year’s course of benralizumab injections reduced asthma attacks by a third to a half, according to The Lancet.

But vitamin D didn’t improve the strength of the lungs or asthma symptoms day-to-day.

“The findings relating to severe asthma attacks come from just three trials in which the patients were mostly adults with mild or moderate asthma”, he said.

In interviews given to journalists, they suggest people consider taking vitamin D, and one researcher said people should request a test to see if they have low vitamin D levels, then ask their GP or pharmacist for advice.