Vitamin D boosts calcium absorption, treats psoriasis, prevents osteoporosis and Breast Cancer

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Vitamin D boosts calcium absorption, treats psoriasis, prevents osteoporosis and

Breast Cancer JoAnn Guest Apr 02, 2005 14:15 PST

Interview with Dr. Michael Holick

http://www.newstarget.com/003142.html

 

The following is part one of an eight-part interview with Dr. Michael

Holick, author of " The UV advantage " and one of the world's most

respected authorities on vitamin D and the health benefits of natural

sunlight. His work can be found at www.UVadvantage.com. Be sure to print

out the vitamin D myths, facts and statistics page summarizing the key

points of this interview.

 

Adams: Today we're speaking with Dr Michael Holick, Thank you for

joining us today Dr Holick.

 

Dr. Holick: Oh, it's my pleasure.

 

 

 

Adams: For those who may not be familiar with your work and your

website, can you give a brief introduction of what you cover and how you

got into it?

 

Dr. Holick: Sure, I've been doing research in the vitamin D field for,

now, more than 30 years, and I happened to be in the right place at the

right time as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, and

worked with one of the authorities in vitamin D, Dr. Hector DeLuca. As a

graduate student my PhD project was actually the isolation and

identification of the active form of vitamin D, and my roommate and I,

over the next two years, were the first to chemically synthesize it. And

what was really neat about that experience was that we actually gave

this to patients when I was in medical school -- and patients that had

bone diseases associated with kidney failure, that were wheelchair

bound, that had severe bone pain started walking again.

 

That was my first introduction into one of the major benefits of

activated vitamin D and the development of it for the treatment of a

bone disease.

 

Adams: Does this mean you and your colleague were the first to

synthesize this form of vitamin D?

 

Dr. Holick: Yes, the active form of vitamin D that's made by the kidney,

it's called 125-dihydroxy vitamin D.

 

Adams: Is this procedure more widely used now, for example to make

vitamin D supplements?

 

Dr. Holick: No, because this active form of vitamin D is available only

by prescription. It's used to treat osteoporosis in Europe and Japan.

And it's also used to treat bone disease and kidney failure patients,

and has a lot of other uses as well.

 

Adams: So as you were doing the research on this, you were able to

immediately observe the health impact of it, right away.

 

Dr. Holick: Exactly, and what we began to realize was that vitamin D was

much more complex than thought. We always knew that vitamin D was made

in your skin when you are exposed to sunlight, but it was only in the

1970s that it was finally appreciated that it actually had to go on this

circuitous journey, first to your liver to get hydroxylated, kind of

activated, modified -- what's called 25-hydroxy vitamin D - it's the

major circulating form of vitamin D that doctors should be measuring in

your blood to determine your vitamin D status. But that is also

inactive, and it has to go to your kidneys, and then in the kidneys it

gets modified again, to its active form, which we call 125-dihydroxy

vitamin D. And it's this 125-dihydroxy vitamin D that's responsible for

telling your intestines to absorb calcium from your diet more

efficiently, and to make sure that your blood calcium is normal and that

you have healthy bones.

 

Adams: So if there is a failure of any of these body systems along the

chain, that can suppress the circulating active vitamin D then?

 

Dr. Holick: Exactly, and in fact if you have severe liver disease, for

example, you have two problems. One is that you may not be able to

modify it, to get the 25-hydroxy vitamin D, and secondly if you have a

fat malabsorption problem where you can't absorb dietary fat, since

vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, then you can't absorb vitamin D and

you become deficient in vitamin D. Then if you have any kind of kidney

disease, you need either activated vitamin D or one its analogs in order

to be able to maintain healthy bones.

 

Adams: In the testing then that you mentioned, was this active form

being given through injection?

 

Dr. Holick: You could either take it orally or by injections.

 

Adams: Interesting. So you mentioned the positive impact on people who

had trouble walking, who had osteoporosis, and various bone diseases.

What other effects did you observe?

 

Dr. Holick: We also realized a few years later was that your skin

doesn't only make vitamin D, which I think we'll talk about a little bit

more in a minute, but it also recognizes activated vitamin D. And what

was really, to me, quite amazing, was that in 1985 we realized the

possibility that if you take activated vitamin D and put it in skin

cells that you culture from humans, it turns out that activated vitamin

D was probably one of the most potent inhibitors of skin cell growth. So

I reasoned back in 1985 that if that was true, maybe you could take

advantage of it by developing it to treat the hyperproliferative skin

disorder psoriasis. And indeed it's one of the treatments of choice now

worldwide. Both activated vitamin D and its analogs are used worldwide

as the first line therapy for treating psoriasis.

 

And so again it shows you the breadth of activity that vitamin D has.

Not only just to regulate calcium metabolism and bone health, but to

regulate cell growth. And that's why we started realizing that people

who live in higher latitudes and are more prone to vitamin D deficiency

and are more prone to developing common cancers and dying of them, such

as cancer of the colon, prostate, breast and even ovaries. And we think

that that's in part due to the body's inability to make enough activated

vitamin D to help regulate cell growth and to keep cell growth in check.

 

 

Adams: That would explain the links between breast cancer, prostate

cancer, colon cancer and vitamin D deficiency.

 

Dr. Holick: Exactly. And then the key factor that we found was that, as

I mentioned to you originally, we realized that the kidney was the major

source of the activation of vitamin D. And the function of that is to

make activated vitamin D for bone health. But we now also know that the

prostate, breast, colon and many other tissues in the body can also

activate vitamin D. And by doing so, we think that it locally produces

this 125-dihydroxy vitamin D, which then regulates cell growth. It's a

cell growth modulator. And I spell all this out in my book " The UV

advantage " at www.UVadvantage.com

_________________

 

JoAnn Guest

mrsjo-

DietaryTi-

www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Genes

 

 

 

 

AIM Barleygreen

" Wisdom of the Past, Food of the Future "

 

http://www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Diets.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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