Vitamin D Speeds Up Tuberculosis Recovery

Vitamin D may help speed up the antibiotic treatment of tuberculosis, according to a new randomized, controlled, double-blind research study. The study was conducted at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. The study was published in The Lancet.

In the research study, which was headed by Dr. Adrian Martineau of the Centre for Health Sciences at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, 146 study participants who suffered from a drug-sensitive form of tuberculosis were selected from 10 National Health Service Trusts in London and then randomly and evenly picked to receive either 4 doses of 2.5mg of vitamin D, or a sham treatment. All of the patients in the study were getting the standard antibiotic treatment for tuberculosis.

The mean time to recovery of tuberculosis from the lungs among all the patients was six weeks for participants who were getting standard therapy alone and five weeks for patients who were receiving additional vitamin D, although this difference is not big enough to achieve statistical significance. However, participants with a specific genetic type of vitamin D receptor were significantly more vitamin D responsive than the others and were clear of TB bacteria much faster if they took vitamin D in addition to the standard treatment.

Ninety-seven percent of the participants (122/126) did not have adequate levels of vitamin D at baseline. Vitamin D deficiency is often seen in TB patients - an attribute which may be due to lack of sun in the UK, or to diets which are low in vitamin D. It may be possible that tuberculosis can contribute to vitamin D deficiency by a mechanism which is not known at present.

Vitamin D is mostly known for its effects on bone - that it helps prevent rickets and osteomalacia - but it also has significant effects on the human immune system. High doses of vitamin D were used in the treatment of tuberculosis before antibiotics were available, but previous clinical trials which have been performed did not find out how tuberculosis patients' genetic make-up could alter their response to a vitamin D supplement. The result that participants who have a specific type of vitamin D receptor are particularly responsive to vitamin D is a new one, and gives us information about how vitamin D could affect the immune response.