Sickle Cell children need more than 7,000 IU of vitamin D daily

Created May 2015

Safety and Efficacy of High-dose Daily Vitamin D3 Supplementation in Children and Young Adults With Sickle Cell Disease.

J Pediatr Hematol Oncol. 2015 May 13. [Epub ahead of print]

Dougherty KA1, Bertolaso C, Schall JI, Smith-Whitley K, Stallings VA.

1*The School of Health Sciences, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Galloway, NJ †University Hospital Umberto I, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy ‡Department of Pediatrics, Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition §Division of Hematology, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia ∥Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

see also Sickle cell and Omega-3 at bottom of this page

Black children with sickle cell disease 7,000 IU daily for 12 weeks All children then had > 20 ng of vitamin D Less than half of children had > 32 ng of vitamin D Speculation by VitaminDWiki Does sickle cell disease, like MS and Diabetes, consume vitamin D? See also VitaminDWiki Search VitaminDWiki for "SICKLE CELL" 222 items as of May 2015 Items in both categories of Bone Health and Dark Skin {category}

Suboptimal vitamin D (vit D) status (<32 ng/mL) is ubiquitous among African American children with type SS sickle cell disease (SCD-SS). The vit D supplemental dose to normalize vit D status is unknown. Five to 20-year-old African American children with (n=21) and without (n=23) SCD-SS were randomized to vit D3 supplementation (4000 or 7000 IU/d) and evaluated at 6 and 12 weeks for changes in vit D and SCD status. A dose was considered unsafe if serum calcium was elevated associated with elevated serum 25 hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D). At baseline 95% of subjects with SCD-SS and 87% of healthy controls had suboptimal vit D status (mean±SD, 19.2±7.2 and 22.3±9.3 ng/mL, respectively). After 12 weeks supplementation, both D3 doses were safe and well tolerated. Neither group achieved the a priori efficacy criterion of 25(OH)D≥32 ng/mL in >80% of subjects (45% in SCD-SS and 63% in controls). However, for both subjects with SCD-SS and healthy subjects by 12 weeks, deficient (<20 ng/mL) vit D status was eliminated only in those receiving 7000 IU/d. For subjects with SCD-SS, by 12 weeks there was a significant (all P<0.05) increase in fetal hemoglobin, decrease in high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, and reduction in the percentage of subjects with a high platelet count.

PMID: 25985241

Sickle cell also helped by Omega-3 - Nov 2012

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Results: Omega-3 treatment reduced the median

rate of clinical vaso-occlusive events (0 compared with 1.0 per year, P , 0.0001),
severe anemia (3.2% compared with 16.4%; P , 0.05),
blood transfusion (4.5% compared with 16.4%; P , 0.05),
white blood cell count (14.4 6 3.3 compared with 15.6 6 4.0 3103 /mL; P , 0.05), and the
OR of the inability to attend school at least once during the study period because of illness related to the disease
- to 0.4 (95% CI: 0.2, 0.9; P , 0.05).