Vitamin D & Parkinson's Disease

Vitamin D & Parkinson's Disease

I'm staying with someone at the moment who has severe Parkinson's Disease, so this news item hits rather close to home:

A majority of Parkinson's disease patients had insufficient levels of vitamin D in a new study from Emory University School of Medicine.
The fraction of Parkinson's patients with vitamin D insufficiency, 55 percent, was significantly more than patients with Alzheimer's disease (41 percent) or healthy elderly people (36 percent).
The results are published in the October issue of Archives of Neurology.
The finding adds to evidence that low vitamin D is associated with Parkinson's, says first author Marian Evatt, MD, assistant professor of neurology at Emory.
Evatt is assistant director of the Movement Disorders Program at Wesley Woods Hospital. The senior author is endocrinologist Vin Tangpricha, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Emory and director of the Endocrine Clinical Research Unit.
Evatt says her team compared Parkinson's patients to Alzheimer's patients because they wanted to evaluate the possibility that neurodegenerative diseases in general lead to vitamin D insufficiency.
Most Americans get the majority of their vitamin D from exposure to sunlight or by dietary supplements; fortified foods such as milk and packaged cereals are a minor source. Only a few foods in nature contain substantial amounts of vitamin D, such as salmon and tuna.
The body's ability to produce vitamin D using UV-B radiation from the sun decreases with age, making older individuals at increased risk of vitamin D deficiency.
"We found that vitamin D insufficiency may have a unique association with Parkinson's, which is intriguing and warrants further investigation," Evatt says.
The connection could come partly because patients with Parkinson's have mobility problems and are seldom exposed to the sun, or because low vitamin D levels are in some way related to the genesis or progression of the disease.
She says her team saw their results as striking because their study group came from the Southeast, not a region with long gloomy winters, where vitamin D insufficiency is thought to be more of a problem.

This isn't the first work that suggests a connection. This paper from last year argues for such a connection. This paper was published in 1997, and points to an apparent connection between high rates of fractures and vitamin D deficiency in those with Parkinson's. While this 1990 article abstract doesn't provide enough information to figure out if there is a connection, it is interesting to see what the keywords list includes. This 2005 article from a Korean medical journal, while not directly addressing the question of vitamin D deficiency and Parkinson's, does suggest that there is some relationship between vitamin D receptor gene variations and Parkinson's.