No link with vitamin D levels at birth and adult-onset MS

Has another MS hypothesis bitten the dust? #MSBlog #MSResearch

"This study below is one we wanted to do a few years ago using Guthrie cards (blood spots taken at birth); the study shows that vD levels at birth are not a risk factor for developing adult-onset MS. This is a real blow for the theory that intrauterine vD deficiency was affecting the maturation of the fetal immune system and planting the seeds for the development of autoimmune disease later in life. It also questions the month-of-birth effect data being linked to vD and gives credence to the recent publication questioning whether or not MS is linked to month of birth, or the effect is simply an artifact of the way the data is analysed. It also blows a hole in the MS prevention strategy of making sure all pregnant women are vD replete during pregnancy."


'The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.' Thomas Henry Huxley.

"May be we need some more science, before we throw away the beautiful hypothesis that intrauterine vD deficiency increases one's lifetime risk of developing autoimmune disease. Time for some reading, thinking and quite contemplation."
Ueda et al. Neonatal vitamin D status and risk of multiple sclerosis. Ann Neurol. 2014 Jul. doi: 10.1002/ana.24210

Objective: Low vitamin D status at birth may be associated with risk of adult onset MS, but this link has not been studied directly. We assessed the relation between neonatal vitamin D concentrations, measured in stored blood samples, and risk of multiple sclerosis.

Methods: This was a population-based case-control study in Sweden including 459 incident cases of multiple sclerosis and 663 controls, randomly drawn from a national population registry and frequency matched on sex, age and residential area.

Results: There was no association between neonatal 25-hydroxyvitamin D quintile and risk of multiple sclerosis (crude odds ratio 1.0, 95% confidence interval 0.68 to 1.44, for the highest quintile compared to the lowest). Adjusting for a number of potential confounding factors in early life (month of birth, latitude of birth, breastfeeding) and in adult life (25-hydroxyvitamin D, sun exposure, vitamin D intake from dairy products, fat fish consumption, smoking, body mass index at 20 years of age) as well as ancestry, multiple sclerosis heredity, and socioeconomic group, did not considerably affect the result.

Interpretation: At a broad population level, 25-hydroxyvitamin D at birth was not associated with risk of multiple sclerosis

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