Diagnosing and Managing Vitamin D Deficiency

Monday, 22 February 2010 12:14

Vitamin D is essential for normal intestinal absorption of calcium which is a major building block of bone. It’s important to know your blood level of vitamin D. Insufficiency is clinically defined as blood levels less than 30 ng/ml, and an individual is considered deficient if blood levels fall below 20 ng/ml.

According to the British Medical Journal, “Vitamin D status is most reliably determined by assay of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D,” and your doctor or healthcare provider can easily order this test, if it has not already been done.

Fortunately, treating vitamin D deficiency is relatively simple. The most common approach is to prescribe relatively high priming doses of vitamin D for a few weeks to a few months, depending on the severity of the deficiency. After blood levels normalize, doses are reduced to 1,000 to 2,000 IU daily to maintain normal levels.