Vitamin D and Its Effects on Coronavirus Severity

As COVID-19 rises around the nation, many continue to seek ways to build immunity. Can vitamin D help decrease severity of symptoms?

The virus known as COVID-19, or the coronavirus, has ripped through the world in just one year and many places are currently seeing the largest rates of infection since the beginning of the pandemic. As doctors and researchers learn more about the disease and its effects, there are also many studies being conducted and under review regarding immunity boosting nutrients or vitamins. Limited studies have been produced but some are linking benefits of vitamin D to coronavirus severity.

Benefits of Vitamin D

Vitamin D is an important nutrient the human body needs to function in a healthy way. According to Medical News Today, “Vitamin D is essential for several reasons, including maintaining healthy bones and teeth. It may also protect against a range of diseases and conditions, such as type 1 diabetes. Despite its name, vitamin D is not a vitamin, but a prohormone, or precursor of a hormone. Vitamins are nutrients that the body cannot create, and so a person must consume them in the diet. However, the body can produce vitamin D”. Vitamin D can also help boost immunity and help in fighting disease. Vitamin D can be absorbed through the skin when a person gets adequate sunlight, approximately 10-15 minutes a day. Many people, especially those in colder climates and long winters, are at risk for vitamin D deficiency as they do not get out in the sunlight enough in the cold months. Likewise, those who work indoors or work night shifts are also at risk for having too little vitamin D in their body. General recommendations for vitamin D dosage for children and adults is 600 IU, or 15 mcg. Those who do not get enough or close to recommended doses are at a greater risk in general for infection or disease. (retrieved from Medical News Today).

Vitamin D and Coronavirus

Several studies have been conducted over the past year regarding the supplementation of vitamin D and it’s correlation to coronavirus severity. According to Healthline, recent scientific research has concluded that vitamin D supplementation might protect against respiratory infections, especially in people who were already deficient in vitamin D to begin with. Keeping sufficient vitamin D levels in the body has been shown to potentially help aid in preventing serious complications or fatalities. Furthermore, Medical News reports that studies showed a reduction in effects of the cytokine storm, which is the escalated inflammatory response that occurs in some individuals with the coronavirus. “Additional data suggests that vitamin D may reduce some of the unfavorable downstream immunological responses to COVID-19 that are associated with severe manifestations through the disease. Some of these downstream pathways that vitamin D may be involved in include preventing the rise of interleukin 6 (IL-6) levels and delaying the interferon-gamma response”. (retrieved from Medical News). The Mayo Clinic also reports similar findings, showing that of those who had serious complications, vitamin D showed to help. In a small, randomized study of 50 participants given a high dose of a type of vitamin D (calcifediol), only one needed to be treated in the ICU. They had 26 patients who were not given the vitamin D, and 13 of the 26 participants needed to be treated in the ICU (retrieved from The Mayo Clinic).

Conclusion

Although supplementation with vitamin D is not proven to either prevent or treat the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), there have been a number of positive findings that support vitamin D as a helpful immune boosting nutrient. These findings are in line with what has been supportive evidence in favor of vitamin D and its immune support against other viruses and infections. Most people can benefit from vitamin D supplementation and from eating immune boosting foods. To see our blog on best foods to boost immunity, click here. The best ways to prevent contracting the novel coronavirus remain social distancing, avoiding indoor gatherings, wearing a mask when in public and washing hands regularly. Eating a healthy diet and making sure that the body is getting the daily recommendations of nutrients can help boost immunity and keep the body strong no matter what type of illness or infection.

COVID-19 Is More Deadly In Obese People

Studies have shown that COVID-19 is more deadly in obese people, even if they are still young.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, many studies have reported that many of the sickest COVID-19 patients are people who are obese. In recent weeks, that link has come into sharper focus as large new population studies have strengthened the association and demonstrated that even people who are merely overweight are at higher risk. According to ScienceMag, in the metaanalysis published on 26 August in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers pooled data from scores of peer-reviewed papers capturing 399,000 patients. They found that people who are obese who contracted SARS-CoV-2 were 113% more likely than people who have a healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die. One of the largest descriptive studies of hospitalized U.S. COVID-19 patients, posted as a preprint on August by Genentech researchers, found that 77% of nearly 17,000 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were overweight (29%) or obese (48%). Another study captured the rate of COVID-19 hospitalizations among more than 334,000 people in England. Published also in August, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that although the rate peaked in people with a BMI of 35 or greater, it began to rise as soon as someone tipped into the overweight category.

There are many possible reasons why this is the case. For example, people who are obese are more difficult to care for. It may be more challenging to put a tube down their airway when hooking them up to a ventilator. They may also have reduced lung capacity. There are also other physiological and social factors involved. Obesity typically brings more conditions such as impaired immunity, chronic inflammation, and blood that’s prone to clotting. All of those conditions can worsen COVID-19 symptoms. Because obesity is so stigmatized, people who are obese also may avoid medical care.

It’s devastating to see the impact of obesity in COVID-19 patients, especially in younger patients. It could be one of the reasons why COVID-19 impact is so devastating in the United States, because 40% of American adults are obese. People who are obese have more risks of other serious diseases that are independent risk factors for severe COVID-19 complications, including heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes.

The physical conditions that render people who are obese vulnerable to severe COVID-19 symptoms begin with the mechanics: Fat in the abdomen pushes up on the diaphragm, causing that large muscle, which lies below the chest cavity, to impinge on the lungs and restrict airflow. This reduced lung volume leads to collapsing of the airways in the lower lobes of the lungs, where more blood arrives for oxygenation than in the upper lobes. Other issues compound these mechanical problems. For starters, the blood of people who are obese has an increased tendency to clot. Immunity also weakens in people with obesity, in part because fat cells infiltrate the organs where immune cells are produced and stored-such as the spleen, bone marrow, and thymus. They are losing immune tissue in exchange for adipose tissue, making the immune system less effective in either protecting the body from pathogens or responding to a vaccine.

The problem is not only fewer immune cells, but less effective ones. One study about obesity and immunity at the University of North Carolina studied how obese mice respond to the influenza virus. It demonstrated that key immune cells called T-cells do not function as well in the obese state. They make fewer molecules that help destroy virus-infected cells, and the corps of “memory” T-cells left behind after an infection, which is key to neutralizing future attacks by the same virus, is smaller than in mice of healthy weight.

Looking at these facts, people with obesity should take extra care and be extra cautious. It is really important to follow the social distancing protocols. Always wash your hands, wear a mask, and avoid large gatherings. With free time at home, find some simple exercises and try to lose weight. Even a little weight loss can improve the metabolic health of a person with obesity. By doing that, you are reducing your chances of developing severe COVID-19 if you do get infected.

Source: Science Mag

COVID-19 Vaccine May Not Work on Obese People

Even with COVID vaccines, people who are obese may still be a population who are highly vulnerable to COVID-19.

It has been reported that obesity is linked with risk factors for severe COVID-19 symptoms. Since March 2020, studies after studies have poured in from countries around the world reaching the same conclusion. People who are obese are more likely to die from COVID-19 than are those of normal weight, even when factors such as diabetes and hypertension are taken into account.

According to Nature Research Journal vaccines might not be as effective in people who are obese, a population already highly vulnerable to COVID-19.

About 42% of Americans are obese, which poses quite a challenge for the effectiveness of the long and dearly waited for COVID-19 vaccination. Around the globe, a general expectation is when we have the vaccine we will have a strong shield against COVID-19. For the obese, the bad news is vaccine may not be as good of a shield for as it is for non-obese people. It is already established that for people with underlying conditions COVID-19 could manifest complications. Obesity is linked with diabetes, heart disease and other risk factors for severe COVID-19 symptoms, so it is not just obesity but the conditions and diseases that generally go along with it.

Obesity is also linked to less-diverse populations of microbes in the gut, nose and lung; with altered compositions and metabolic functions compared with those in lean individuals. Those gut microbes can influence the immune responses to pathogens and to vaccines. This hypothesis is backed by studies of vaccines against influenza, Hepatitis B and rabies, which have show reduced responses in people who are obese compared with people who are lean.

However some researchers are still unconvinced that obesity will blunt the efficacy of vaccines because those studies on influenza vaccines were relatively small. Even if that is true, there might be ways to compensate for the vaccine shortcomings. One possibility is to give obese people extra doses of vaccine, maybe two or three injections instead of one.

There are currently three leading candidate vaccines currently being tested in large clinical trials. Unfortunately, the trials might not have samples that will allow it to determine whether obesity affects the vaccine response because it depends on who volunteers for the trial. It also depends on how well trial sponsors are at recruiting individuals from under-represented minority groups. In the end the world will still need to wait for data from clinical studies to draw conclusions. However, with the current studies showing an association between the severity of COVID-19 symptoms and obesity, hopefully it can push some governments and their health-care systems to tackle the growing obesity problems in their countries.

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Source: Nature 586, 488-489 (2020)