Over the past several months, I’ve written with some consistency about the importance of vitamin D and how many of us are deficient in it. The mainstream media have finally caught on to this fact, and now even they are reporting on the insufficient levels of vitamin D found in children, as health professionals everywhere have long been advocating an increase in the RDA levels of vitamin D (there have been an increasing number of rickets diagnoses in recent years, rickets causes bowlegs and poor bone development and results from vitamin D insufficiency). The American Academy of Pediatrics finally increased the recommended levels, doubling the daily values from 200 IUs to 400 IUs for children starting at birth.

But low vitamin D levels are having their effect on those long since removed from birth as well, for a recent study shows that people afflicted with Parkinson’s disease are also abnormally low in this all-important vitamin.

Parkinson’s disease is a degenerative disease that’s best typified by constant shaking (tremors), slowness of movement and poor balance. Anyone who has seen Michael J. Fox or Muhammad Ali knows the kind of toll it places on the body, which stems from the brain’s diminished ability to produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter that controls movement, among many other functions.

The study began as a result of a question researchers from Emory University had: Were Vitamin D levels and neurodegenerative diseases – diseases that impact the brain and the nervous system at large – linked? In other words, did people afflicted with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s have vitamin D levels lower than other elderly people who weren’t saddled by neurological diseases?

What they found was that while some Alzheimer’s patients were in fact low in vitamin D (41 percent), they weren’t nearly as low in vitamin D as those suffering from Parkinson’s. More than half (55 percent) of the 100 people with Parkinson’s tested had low levels of vitamin D. “Low levels” can be interpreted as 30 nanograms per milliliter of blood.

Their findings present a number of questions for researchers to consider for future study. One of them, of course, is why Parkinson patients are low in vitamin D levels. Researchers suspect it might have something to do with an inability to get outside quite as readily as in past years due to the disease’s degenerative impact on the body. The sun is probably the best way in which to increase one’s vitamin D levels, as the sun provides the fuel the body needs to manufacture vitamin D.

Another question is whether it’s Parkinson’s that diminishes vitamin D levels or if being deficient in the fat soluble vitamin increases one’s risk for Parkinson’s. It’s basically a scientific version of which came first: the chicken or the egg? Researchers are currently engaged in a pilot study where Parkinson’s patients are receiving either recommended or increased levels of vitamin D, hoping to determine whether or not supplementation with vitamin D lessens the disease’s severity.

While this study seems to raise more questions than answers, there does seem to be something fishy going on when more than half of those with Parkinson’s had low vitamin D levels. As the saying goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

It should be interesting to see what questions the pilot study answers; it could give more credence to the notion that vitamin D is indeed a ‘D’fensive vitamin.