— Otherwise healthy college-aged women with low levels are more likely to be depressed.
by Parker Brown, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
March 20, 2015
Another day, another study on depression and vitamin D.
This one found a relationship between the vitamin and depression in otherwise healthy young women in the Pacific Northwest. Vitamin D levels were measured over a 5-week period, and were found to be common — 42% had vitamin D deficiency (<30nm/mL) at week 1, and 46% at week five.
This isn’t exactly the first time depression and the vitamin, or perhaps hormone, have been linked: an earlier study showed that both major and minor depression was associated with 14% lower vitamin D levels than those who didn’t suffer from depression. Links in other populations have also been found.
But if there’s a link, erasing the deficiency with supplements doesn’t seem to fix the problem, at least not in the dosages commonly prescribed. Vitamin D supplementation didn’t have any significant effect on depressive symptoms in a meta-analysis of seven trials with nearly 3,200 patients.
And the authors of the paper — led by David Kerr, PhD, at Oregon State University — say that the effect of supplementation on depression remains inconclusive. It will likely remain so until the results of several larger, randomized trials are released.
“Depression has multiple, powerful causes and if vitamin D is part of the picture, it is just a small part,” said Kerr in a press release. “But given how many people are affected by depression, any little inroad we can find could have an important impact on public health.”
The results of the new study were published this week in Psychiatry Research. There were 185 undergraduate participants, aged 18-25. They also found that women of color were more often vitamin D deficient and depressed than other women, and that the association between race and depressive symptoms was partially explained by levels of vitamin D.