12 Dec To Your Health: Vitamin D & Brain Health!
Telluride local Dr. Alan Safdi is a world-renowned internist and gastroenterologist with encyclopedic knowledge of mind-body wellness and preventative medicine. He posts from time to tome on Telluride Inside… and Out under the banner of “To Your Health.” Dr. Alan’s blogs feature the most current information in his fields: health, wellness and longevity.
This week, Dr. Alan curated a story from Medical News Today titled “Low levels of vitamin D linked to poor cognitive function.”
Go here to learn more about where researchers found vitamin D in the brain and how it may support healthy cognitive function, jump to “Low levels of vitamin D in the brain linked to increased dementia risk.”
Links to other podcasts and narratives by Dr. Alan are here.
There is growing evidence for how your body relies on vitamin D to ward off inflammation, cancer, and heart disease. Having enough of it in your blood is linked to a lower risk of dying prematurely. But what about vitamin D and the brain? What is its role in cognition, or dementia, if any? As one researcher told Medical News Today this week, “we did not know if vitamin D was even present in the human brain.”
The researcher, Kyla Shea, PhD, is lead author of a study offering the first evidence that vitamin D is not only present in the brain, a healthy level of it is associated with better cognitive function and a lower risk of dementia in older adults.
The evidence comes from the postmortem study of the brains of 290 individuals who had agreed to donate their organs after death. Researchers found that higher concentrations of vitamin D across the brain were associated with up to a 33% lower chance of developing dementia.
It is early days, so precisely how vitamin D supports healthy cognitive function is not yet understood. Dr. Shea sees signs that it is involved in cell-signaling pathways that may be part of neuro-degeneration, but more research is needed to build on this groundbreaking study.
Dr. Alan Safdi, more:
Dr. Alan Safdi is board-certified in Internal Medicine and in Gastroenterology and is a Fellow of the American College of Gastroenterology. A proven leader in the healthcare arena, he has been featured on the national program, “Medical Crossfire” and authored or co-authored numerous medical articles and abstracts.
Safdi, a long-time Telluride local, has been involved in grant-based and clinical research for four decades. He is passionate about disease prevention and wellness, not just fixing what has gone wrong.
Dr. Alan is an international lecturer on the subjects of wellness, nutrition and gastroenterology.
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