Vitamin D is an essential nutrient that your body needs for the good health of the bones and the muscles. It is a unique vitamin because your skin produces it by using sunlight.
It is a fact that fair-skinned and young people convert more sunlight to Vitamin D as compared to darker-skinned people who are more than 50. To know your vitamin D levels, get yourself tested by just typing as Pathology Lab Near Me.
WHAT IS THE BASIC NEED OF VITAMIN D IN OUR BODY?
It is one of the vital vitamins our body needs to stay healthy. There are many functions of our body that are operated by vitamin D, two of the main functions are listed below:
To Keep our Bones Strong
Vitamin D gives you strong and healthy bones. It helps to prevent bones from becoming brittle, which could lead to fracture very easily. In children, deficiency of vitamin D could lead to Rickets which causes bones to be soft and weak. This vitamin helps calcium and phosphorus to build bones.
To Absorb Calcium Properly
Our body needs vitamin D to absorb calcium, which further promotes good bone health. Without vitamin D, calcium is not absorbed properly even if you take good supplements of calcium. You need to have enough vitamin D in your body to get the benefits of calcium. Also, the working of the parathyroid gland depends on vitamin D. If there is a deficiency of vitamin D, it will lead to a shortage of Calcium in the body. Now the parathyroid gland will borrow calcium from the skeleton, making it weak.
EFFECTS OF LOW VITAMIN D ON COVID-19 PATIENTS
Vitamin D helps to modulate both innate and adaptive immunity of the body. So, with low vitamin D levels, the body is more susceptible to infections by bacteria and viruses.
The same happens in the case of the Coronavirus pandemic. At many places, the reports with lower rates of Vitamin D were believed to be the cause of higher mortality rates.
In a recent study in India, these were some of the outcomes related to the relation between COVID -19 and Vitamin D:
- Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased levels of cytokines which increases the risk of pneumonia and upper respiratory tract infections, which are determinants of the harshness of illness among COVID-19 patients.
- Low-level Vitamin D also links with the increase of thrombosis, which is commonly identified in COVID-19 patients.
- COVID-19 is more prevalent among the group of people who are in the older age group, obese, smokers or suffering from some chronic diseases like hypertension or diabetes. In all these cases, the common factor is a deficiency of Vitamin D.
- From all these observations, it is intended that deficiency of Vitamin D could be an important risk factor among the COVID-19 patients.
PREVENTION IS BETTER THAN CURE
Well, we have mentioned how vitamin D deficiency could lead to a complicated recovery from the Coronavirus. So, all of us need to have a good source of vitamin D from:
- Being exposed to sunlight for at least 15 minutes in the morning.
- Through a rich diet.
- Nutritional supplements for Vitamin D.
And the most important is to get yourself tested for the deficiency of Vitamin D regularly. In the market, this test is very costly, but if you go for Lifecare Laboratories you can get it done at a very low rate. Life Care Foundation is a Non-Governmental Organization with the aim to provide the cheapest health checkups.