Vitamin D3 Can Help Asthma Patient’s Treatment

Natural resources are always best! And, it seems that even people that have extremely hard-to-treat asthma can benefit from Vitamin D3 in their diet!

Vitamin supplement could help treatment-resistant asthma

“Asthma patients who don’t respond to steroid treatment suffer repeated asthma attacks, and are at greater risk of dying from the condition. Researchers from King’s College London have found that vitamin D3 could substantially improve the responsiveness of these patients to steroid treatment, offering them hope of an improvement in their condition. Their results are published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Asthma is usually treated very effectively with inhaled steroids but for some patients, taking steroid tablets is the only way of controlling their condition, and this can cause considerable side effects. Unfortunately a sub-group of people with severe asthma fail to show clinical improvement, even with high doses of oral steroids, limiting their treatment options.”

The steroid treatments were not as effective in these severe cases, but, then the researchers added Vitamin D3:

“However, the researchers found that when vitamin D3 was added to the culture medium along with dexamethasone, this defect was reversed and the previously steroid-resistant cells were able to respond to the treatment by producing IL-10 to the same extent as T-cells taken from steroid-responsive patients. Adding vitamin D3 to cultures of T-cells from healthy individuals or from steroid-responsive patients made these cells even more responsive to steroids than before.”

The Vitamin D3 made the treatment more effective! “‘Interestingly, vitamin D3 is at present occasionally administered to patients with severe asthma to help prevent steroid-induced osteoporosis. Our studies suggest that there is an additional potential benefit to this treatment.'”