Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease that personally afflicts my family and affects 130,000 people in the UK, with 7000 new diagnoses made each year.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease that personally afflicts my family and affects 130,000 people in the UK, with 7000 new diagnoses made each year. There is no cure for the disease.A published 2-year prospective cohort study, a type of observational study that can help create hypotheses for further trials and identify associations, was conducted in adults with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. The study looked at supplementing with vitamin D. It found that maintaining optimal vitamin D levels, or higher, was associated with beneficial radiological outcomes.Vitamin D is a vitamin and hormone responsible for increasing absorption of important nutrients, such as calcium, magnesium and phosphate, amongst 100s of other effects.The participants that took vitamin D had fewer new lesions found after 2 years.

However, there was no association with clinical outcomes (how the participant felt).This is a small study, but further adds evidence of a relationship between vitamin D and MS.Randomised controlled trials (RCT) will help to identify a cause and effect, however, I think the real thing to test in RCT here is to find out how much vitamin D is needed to gain clinical results, over testing a set dose and placebo. So, basically give people different vitamin D doses to maintain optimum and compare them to a placebo. This would not only give cause and effect information, but start to piece together how much vitamin D a person with MS needs to gain any potential benefits.Link to the full article here:https://lnkd.in/eGXzvst7