Prevalence and prognostic value of vitamin D deficiency in inflammatory bowel disease patients

Abstract

Over the past decade, interest has grown in the role of vitamin D in many non skeletal medical conditions.Emerging evidence suggests that the consequences of vitamin D deficiency extend beyond its well-known effects on bone metabolism and calcium homeostasis, and also include alterations of specific arms of immunity. Recent studies describing the immunomodulatory function of vitamin D have suggested that vitamin D activity could play an extenuating role in the occurrence and progression of inflamatory bowel diseases which thought that they results from an inappropriate immune response to luminal antigens in the gut. This cross sectional study was designed to study the prevalence of vitamin D defficiency in IBD patients and its association with disease activity. The study was conducted on 40 IBD patients, aged from 17 to 55 years, 30 patients were active IBD and 10 patient had inactive IBD. versus 20 healthy persons, age and sex matched taken as a control group. All patients included in this study were subjected to complete history, clinical examination and Laboratory investigation (CBC,ESR and CRP), and detection of serum vit D levels was done. In this study there was no significant difference between IBD patients and control group as regard age (33.40 ± 9.53 vs 37.55 ± 13.24years) or sex. We found that IBD patients had lower values of vit D than control ((16.57 ± 11.62 ng/ml vs 29.35 ± 16.79 ng/ml) (p<0.05). Also vitamin D was found deficienct in 65% vs 5%, insufficient in 15 % vs 25% and sufficient in 20% vs 70% of IBD patients and control rsepevtivly. Low vitamin D levels, were frequent in active IBD patients more than inactive IBD patients(14.66 ± 10.75 vs 29.94 ± 8.82 ng/ml) (p<0.05). We found that IBD patients with defficient vit D values had longer duration of the disease than those with insufficient and sufficient vit D values but the difference didn’t reach