Does a better vitamin D status help to reduce cardiovascular risks and events?

Excerpt

Vitamin D is one and maybe even the most frequently used “drug” in the world as it is recommended as supplement during the early years of life from infancy onwards, and is also recommended systematically for all elderly subjects with little exposure to sunlight. This is mainly inspired by the essential role of the vitamin D endocrine system for bone health [1‐3]. The vitamin D receptor and activating enzyme, CYP27B1, are both fairly generally expressed in most tissues and the vitamin D hormone, 1,25(OH)₂D, also regulates a great number of genes, far more than needed for calcium transport. Therefore the question and hypothesis arise that the vitamin D endocrine system would have many extra-skeletal effects and that vitamin D supplementation may help to reduce the burden of nearly all major human diseases [1‐3]. The cardiovascular system may well be such non classical target tissue for vitamin D action based on a vast and rapidly increasing number of publications and reviews in basic and clinical journals, and even in the lay press. Two manuscripts published in the present issue of endocrine add new data for this debate. …