Low vitamin D levels may lead to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease, a new study suggests.
The research, reported at The Endocrine Society's 94th Annual Meeting in Houston, found people with the highest blood levels of vitamin D had a 48 percent lower risk of developing metabolic syndrome – a group of conditions that increases the odds of heart disease and type 2 diabetes – than those with the lowest concentrations.
"This association has been documented before, but our study expands the association to people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds," said the lead researcher Dr. Joanna Mitri, a research fellow at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. "These include minority groups that are already at higher risk of diabetes."
Mitri and her colleagues based their findings an analysis of patients enrolled in the Diabetes Prevention Program, a large study funded by the National Institutes of Health. They divided study participants into three groups based on vitamin D levels.
Those with the highest levels of vitamin D had about half the risk of developing metabolic syndrome as those with the lowest, Mitri said.
The researchers also found an association between low vitamin D levels and a large waist size, low HDL "good" cholesterol, high triglycerides (fats in the blood), high blood pressure and high blood sugar.
"Metabolic syndrome is common, and progression to type 2 diabetes is high," Mitri said. "If a causal relationship can be established in ongoing and planned studies of vitamin D, this link will be of public health importance, because vitamin D supplementation is easy and inexpensive."