As stated by Dr. Manuel Díaz Curiel, specialist in bone metabolic diseases at the Department of Internal Medicine of the Jiménez Díaz Foundation and principal investigator of the work, “a majority of patients hospitalized for COVID19 (66 percent of those studied in the work) had lower baseline levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D-25 (OH) D-(<20 ng / mL) than those of the non-infected population ”.
Patients who died from COVID19 had lower levels of vitamin D
In addition, he has also pointed out that the difference was “significant” regardless of the age and sex of the patients, since it was identified in individuals between 20 and 8 ′ years old and in both women and men.
Additionally, according to the Foundation in a statement, the research indicates that patients admitted to the ICU tended to have lower levels of 25 (OH) D than other hospitalized and, once the patients were stratified by the levels of this vitamin , it was observed that the admission rate to these units was higher among patients with 25 (OH) D deficiency.
According to Díaz Curiel, “the patients who died from COVID19 also had lower levels of vitamin D than the normal population of the same age and sex, although the same as the rest of those admitted, and even in the ICU, therefore that we cannot assume that low levels of 25 (OH) D are a determining factor of mortality ”.
Other doctors have also participated in this study, such as Rosa Arboiro-Pinel, Alfonso Cabello, Ignacio Mahillo-Fernández, Sarah Heili-Frades and Marjorie Andrade-Poveda, all of them professionals from the Jiménez Díaz Foundation and researchers from the IIS-FJD, along with Antonio Herrero-González, responsible for Big Data of the Public Hospitals managed by Quirónsalud in Madrid.
A study was conducted in more than 1,500 patients
This study included a total of 1,549 patients aged between 21 and 104 years (and a mean age of 70 years) and of both sexes, being 835 men and 714 women and analyzed infected patients admitted to the ICU and those who died from COVID19.
It must be assumed that there are currently no definitive data on the relationship between low levels of vitamin D in the blood and a more serious evolution of the disease due to COVID19, in terms of the need for hospital admission, ICU stay and mortality. The objective of the work was to study the association between 25 (OH) D levels and adverse clinical outcomes related to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Researchers observed the incidence of low (below average) and normal levels of vitamin D in patients hospitalized for the coronavirus between March 12 and May 20, 2020, evaluating whether these values differed between these patients and the world population. .
In the end, it was determined whether the need for transfer to the ICU and the mortality rate were related to low levels of 25 (OH) D, whose serum concentrations were measured by electrochemiluminescence, adds the study, which also counted with the collaboration of Dr. Luis Mansur, from the La Plata Center for Endocrinology and Osteoporosis, in Buenos Aires (Argentina).