I try to put cutting-edge medical information about vitamin D on my blog. Because medical knowledge is expanding at such a fast pace, sometimes articles only appear in the online form of the medical literature, before they even show up in the paper publication, or in some cases even before they show up in the journal’s online publication.
In these situations, the article abstract is only available on a website called "PUBMED". PUBMED stands for public medicine. This is the online version which is now freely available to all of us, of what used to be called "INDEX MEDICUS." Now all the medical information that used to be only available to physicians, is available to the whole world instantly. This is in keeping with the speed of our Internet age.
A new article was just published in the medical journal called HEADACHE.
The study reported on eight patients with chronic tension type headaches and who also had vitamin D deficiency to the point of osteomalacia. As you will remember from my book, osteomalacia is adult rickets. All of the patients in the study did not respond well to the conventional therapy for tension headaches.
I am delighted to see that at the recent American Medical Association’s annual meeting a report was presented that reviewed more than 1500 articles, including 300 studies that were published in 2008 alone.
I am very pleased to see the American Medical Association recognizing the overwhelming evidence supporting the importance of vitamin D in the prevention of cancer, infection, cognitive decline, diabetes and several autoimmune diseases.
Two recent studies are showing a link between vitamin D deficiency and depression.
In a study done in Norway and recently published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, researchers found a relation between blood levels of vitamin D and symptoms of depression. In addition, giving high doses of vitamin D in the study seemed to help the symptoms of depression. The authors conclude that this represents a possible causal relationship between vitamin D deficiency and depression.
National Government Services(NGS) which is one of our country’s largest Medicare contractors has made a proposal to stop paying for routine testing of vitamin D! They have announced that if this proposal passes, they will only cover vitamin D testing for patients with chronic kidney disease, osteomalacia, hypercalcemia, and rickets. All other vitamin D testing, specifically routine testing, would be denied.
Medicare has the stated purpose of supporting early detection and prevention of medicine. This proposal seems in direct contradiction to their stated goal.
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