Vitamin D insufficiency high in patients with early Parkinson's disease

A new research has indicated that patients with a recent onset of Parkinson's disease have a high prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency, but vitamin D concentrations do not appear to decline during the progression of the disease.

"Vitamin D insufficiency has been reported to be more common in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) than in healthy control subjects, but it is not clear whether having a chronic disease causing reduced mobility contributes to this relatively high prevalence," wrote the authors.

Marian L Evatt, of Emory University School of Medicine and the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and colleagues examined the prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency in untreated patients with early PD, diagnosed within five years of entry into the study.

They conducted a survey study of vitamin D status in stored blood samples from patients with PD who were enrolled in the placebo group of the Deprenyl and Tocopherol Antioxidative Therapy of Parkinsonism (DATATOP) trial.

The authors found a high prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency in 157 study participants with early, untreated PD. At the baseline visit, most study participants (69.4%) had vitamin D insufficiency and more than a quarter (26.1%) had vitamin D deficiency.

"At the end point/final visit, these percentages fell to 51.6% and 7%, respectively."

"Contrary to our expectation that vitamin D levels might decrease over time because of disease-related inactivity and reduced sun exposure, vitamin D levels increased over the study period," wrote the authors.

"These findings are consistent with the possibility that long-term insufficiency is present before the clinical manifestations of PD and may play a role in the pathogenesis of PD," concluded the authors.

The report has been published in Archives of Neurology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.