By Tom Spears
OTTAWA — A new Canadian study of children hospitalized with severe infections shows three-quarters of them had low levels of vitamin D.
Our bodies make this vitamin when our skin is exposed to spring or summer sunshine. It also comes in cheap pills, in baby formula and drops for breastfed infants.
Canadians tend to have low levels of vitamin D because we live too far north to manufacture it for much of the year. Fall and winter sunshine is too weak.
But the 300 young patients at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and five other hospitals had low levels even by Canadian standards.
And Dr. Dayre McNally noticed another tendency among them: the sickest children and teenagers in the hospitals were usually those with the lowest vitamin D levels.
McNally says most Canadian children need a vitamin D supplement, the dose depending on a person’s age and weight. He says vitamin D doses in multi-vitamins for pregnant women are too low.
The study is published in the scientific journal Pediatrics.