Vitamin D deficiency is associated with respiratory symptoms and airway wall thickening in smokers with and without COPD: a prospective cohort study.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as an observational study.

Previous studies have established a higher prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in patients with COPD, but the relationship between vitamin D levels and COPD exacerbations remains controversial.

In addition, the effect of vitamin D levels on imaging characteristics remains mostly unexplored.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

Current and former smokers between ages 45-80 were enrolled the COPDGene Study.

Subjects completed questionnaires, spirometry, six-minute walk test, and chest computed tomography scans.

How the Study Was Run

A subset of subjects had measurement of serum concentration of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D).

Vitamin D deficiency was defined as serum concentration less than 20 ng/mL.

Longitudinal follow up was conducted via a web-based or telephone questionnaire.

What Was Measured

Previous studies have established a higher prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in patients with COPD, but the relationship between vitamin D levels and COPD exacerbations remains controversial.

In addition, the effect of vitamin D levels on imaging characteristics remains mostly unexplored.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Cross-Sectional Studies, Linear Models, Lung, Multivariate Analysis, Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive, Quality of Life and Respiratory Function Tests.

The authors tagged it with the keywords COPD, Quantitative imaging, Respiratory symptoms and Vitamin D.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is an observational study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2020 (BMC pulmonary medicine), a journal based in England.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.