Vitamin D Deficiency Linked to Accelerated Brain Aging

Brain scans show that vitamin D deficient brains appear older

Vitamin D Deficit is Associated with Accelerated Brain Aging in the General Population is the ominous title of an upcoming paper in the December 2022 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging. As you’re most likely aware, vitamin D plays an essential role in many bodily functions in addition to maintaining bone health and immune function. Virtually every cell in the body has a vitamin D receptor including brain cells. So it stands to reason that if receptors are present for vitamin D that vitamin D influences the function of that cell. Just because we see the receptor doesn’t necessarily mean we understand the role of vitamin D on that cell. This situation is ever so true with respect to understanding vitamin D’s role in brain function.

However, as a first step toward understanding vitamin D’s role in brain function we can ask some relatively simple questions like does the size of the brain vary with respect to vitamin D status. In the present paper, Vitamin D Deficit is Associated with Accelerated Brain Aging in the General Population, the investigators took brain scans (magnetic resonance images, MRI) that measure brain size and volume from 1865 people aged 22 - 82 yrs of age (average age 52) without any known health issues. Those brain scans were sorted with respect to blood levels of vitamin D (range 6.2 ng/ml to 63.7 ng/ml, average 24.3 ng/ml) and they found that lower levels of vitamin D were linked to smaller measured brain volumes. Furthermore, since the brain shrinks with aging, subjects lower in serum vitamin D showed greater age-related shrinkage.

This study suggests two important findings, which are somewhat mirror images of each other. The first is that vitamin D level is related to overall brain mass. This is an instance of bigger is indeed better. Second, vitamin D appears to have a protective effect against brain aging, since those higher in vitamin D experienced less age-related shrinkage compared to others with lower vitamin D.

One interesting issue with this study is the relatively low average vitamin D level of 24.3 ng/ml of the subjects tested. This is much lower than the optimal range of 50-80 ng/ml suggested by contemporary vitamin D scientists. (FYI, one StarPower should get you to around 50 ng/ml.) It would be interesting to scan the brain of long-term vitamin D-optimized people (50-80 ng/ml) to see how their brain compared to age-matched vitamin D deficient controls.

Finally, you’ve probably seen TV ads for a product called Prevagen that claims to “enhance brain function using a substance first discovered in jellyfish”. This substance is called apoaequorin. Unfortunately, apoaequorin is very unlikely to reach the brain as it is dissolved in the stomach never to enter the bloodstream. However, examination of Prevagen’s label may suggest that it isn’t a total fraud as Prevagen lists, as its first ingredient, vitamin D3 (50 mcg which equals 2000 IU).

So, will the makers of Prevagen rework their advertising to focus on the real active ingredient of their product, vitamin D, that actually has some science to support it? Or will they continue on as usual?

See more at StarPowerLifeSciences.org

Reference

Terock, J, et al. (2022) Vitamin D deficit is associated with accelerated brain aging in the general population. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 327, 111558

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925492722001172