Is There an Association Between Inflammation and Serum-Vitamin D? – Results of a Retrospective Analysis of Hospitalized Geriatric Patients

Abstract

Purpose

Vitamin D deficiency is a common finding in geriatric patients. The ESPEN micronutrient guideline states that vitamin D serum levels significantly decrease in the presence of inflammation and should be interpreted with caution. This is of great interest for hospital care and would imply a significant change to the current approach to hospitalized patients with suspected vitamin D deficiency.

Patients and methods

To evaluate the association of vitamin D and inflammation, we reanalyzed the data set of serum 25(OH)D-Levels of 687 consecutive geriatric hospitalized patients of a previously published study.

Results

We found that vitamin D deficiency (<20 ng/dl) was prevalent in 78.0% and vitamin D insufficiency (20–30 ng/dl) in 9.9% of patients. Sperman’s correlation showed a significant but very weak correlation (R = −0.100, P < 0.01) of serum vitamin D and C-reactive protein. However, linear regression with the inclusion of age and gender revealed no significant association (beta-coefficient −0.070; p=0.067).

Conclusion

In this study, we could not confirm a significant and clinically relevant association between serum vitamin D levels and inflammation, contrasting with a previous study. However, longitudinal studies need to be performed to draw a final conclusion.

Keywords:

• Vitamin D
• 25-hydroxyvitamin D
• inflammation
• older
• C-reactive protein
• geriatric

Ethical Standard

The authors declare that the study procedures comply with current ethical standards for research involving human participants in Germany. The study protocol had been approved by the ethical committee of Ruhr-University Bochum. Patient consent was waived due to the retrospective nature of this study, all data was anonymized and maintained with confidentially and all data accessed complied with relevant data protection and privacy regulations.

Author Contributions

All authors made a significant contribution to the work reported, whether that is in the conception, study design, execution, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation, or in all these areas; took part in drafting, revising or critically reviewing the article; gave final approval of the version to be published; have agreed on the journal to which the article has been submitted; and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Disclosure

The authors declare no conflicts of interest in this work.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Funds of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.