The Role of Vitamin D in Managing Inflammatory Bowel Disease

welcome back this is Dr Jin s where clinical Excellence meets excellent results today we're going to talk about

vitamin D and inflammatory bowel disease so let's get right into the video vitamin D and inflammatory bowel disease

ulcerative colitis or even Crohn's disease so let's look at some of the mechanisms here in terms of vitamin D is

very important for immune modulation especially in the innate immunity which enhan is the antimicrobial properties

against gut pathogens so the innate immunity is basically if something shows up and it's for to our body our immune

system just basically attacks it right it's a big response it's an emergency response okay and then you have adaptive

immunity which inhibits pro-inflammatory sections of th1 and th17 and helps promote what we call

regulatory tea cells what adaptive immunity does is basically when this pathogens come in the initial

respon is that innate immunity it tags things and it says okay we need a more specialized response to the specific

pathogen or foreign body and that's where adaptive immunity comes in and it becomes very specific to that individual

pathogen or foreign body okay it also enhances gut barrier it promotes tight junctions and improves leaky gut

syndrome what that means is that when you have inflammation in the gut due to irritable bowel disorders basically

these Junctions or tight junctions in our gut become separated and allows large proteins to cross into the

bloodstream vitamin D helps promote the tight junctions or heals the tight junctions to a certain extent and

improves that leaky gut syndrome preventing for foreign uh materials or foreign proteins to get into the

bloodstream now it also improves gut microbiome it promotes beneficial bacteria and improves what we call short

chain fatty acids short chain fatty acids like acetate berate and propane that's very important for fueling your

good gut microbiome also so it improves gut microbiome that in itself will reduce inflammation helps with leaky gut

Etc it also has antifibrotic and antioxidant properties with Vitamin D it reduces fibrosis in chronic inflammatory

bowel disease so when you have chronic inflammation in your GI tract due to an inflammatory condition it basically

develops scars or fibrosis and vitamin D can help reduce that fibrosis in chronic IBD reduces oxidative stress and

decreases inflammation overall because it helps regulate this inflammatory response up

[Music] here now let's talk about the clinical implications patients with IBD or

inflammatory bow disease will have decreased vitamin D overall due to one malabsorption or leaky

gut uh diet restriction and inflammation basically if you're flamed and your gut is not doing well you're going to have

problems absorbing nutrients so that increases disease activity increases hospitalization and

surgery due to these complications and reduces the response to biologics so vitamin D is very

important uh for many different functions however it can also at low levels reduce the response of the

medications that you're actually taking so potential for improvements right if you took vitamin D or have

proper levels of Vitamin D it can reduce disease uh scores uh these questionnaires that you can utilize

improves quality of life enhances biologics and immunomodulators so it enhances the

medications that you're already on so it's very important to get the proper levels of vitamin D now here's the

important uh Crux of this in order to get the right levels of vitamin D you should be tested so vitamin D 25 hydroxy

on the blood test can be done and the reference range can be anywhere from 30 to 100 n per milliliter okay a safe

dosage for vitamin D can typically range from anywhere from 5,000 international units to 10,000 international units of

vitamin D3 Co coal calciferol okay you want to take vitamin D that's more bioavailable

and easily absorbed so 5,000 to 10,000 unit of vitamin D if you're at the upper limits at 10,000 units I would highly

recommend just checking your blood work to see if you fall within the reference range we like to in our office aim for

between 60 and 80 nanograms per milliliter on the blood test so this is a good safe number now if it's 100 is it

a big deal probably not I've seen patients come in with a number of 200 right here and still have no symptoms of

vitamin D toxicity however to be cautious and safe and everyone's an individual you want to

make sure you get the right levels of vitamin D now even 10,000 units might not be enough to move this number so you

want to maybe take even 20,000 international units of vitamin D but highly recommend taking the vitamin D

test to see what your levels are now there are people who have issues absorbing vitamin D or they they even

have issues with what we call Vitamin D polymorphisms or receptor polymorphisms and they can't uh utilize

the vitamin D that you're orally taking in and you're not converting it into the active forms so you have to look for

individual variations for some people okay now in order to take vitamin D you should think about co-actors vitamin K2

you want to take me anywhere from 90 to 100 micrograms um of mk7 basically

and that's for uh we're calculating this for about uh 5,000 units so 90 to 100 micrograms for 5,000 international units

of vitamin D magnesium 300 to 400 milligram per day you can utilize magnesium glycinate it's a great overall

vitamin uh magnesium supplement there are other forms obviously I do have another video on magnesium so I'll link

that above okay you can also utilize calcium about 1 000 milligram per day either from diet

or supplementation you can utilize zinc 10 to uh 15 milligram per day and Boron 1 to 3 milligrams per day but the most

important is likely going to be the vitamin K2 and the magnesium in order to convert the inactive vitamin D to active

vitamin D in our system so there you have it in a nutshell how to improve vitamin D levels uh for people who have

IBD and for these people who have IBD once you go into remission vitamin D can really help you stay in remission so

it's very important nutrient that you should consider if you have inflammatory bowel disease Al Roc colitis or Crohn's

disease okay my name is Dr Jen Sun we're clinical Excellence meets excellent results and we'll see you guys next week

on the healthy side have an awesome day