Is antenatal or early-life vitamin D associated with eczema or food allergy in childhood? A systematic review.

What It Covers

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in the context of eczema, published as a systematic review.

To summarise the associations between antenatal or early-life blood vitamin D and the development of eczema/food allergy in childhood.

Why It Was Studied

The researchers systematically searched PubMed and Embase from inception and April 2022.

Human studies that investigated prospective associations between antenatal or early-life blood vitamin D levels, dietary intake or supplementation and childhood eczema/food allergy.

Who the Included Studies Covered

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were infants, women only.

The certainty of the evidence was assessed using Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE).

How the Review Was Done

A systematic review and meta-analyses were conducted to synthesize the published literature.

Two reviewers independently performed the study selection and data extraction on Covidence.

The researchers assessed the risk of bias for observational studies by using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool for clinical trials.

What Was Measured

Human studies that investigated prospective associations between antenatal or early-life blood vitamin D levels, dietary intake or supplementation and childhood eczema/food allergy.

The subject headings attached to it are Vitamin D, Eczema, Food Hypersensitivity, Dietary Supplements, Maternal-Fetal Exchange and Maternal Exposure.

The authors tagged it with the keywords cord blood, food allergy and systematic review.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a systematic review of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in people with eczema.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2023 (Clinical and experimental allergy : journal of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, Eczema research.