Vitamin D Deficiency and Chest Infections

When Vitamin D levels are lower than normal the immune system does not work as well as it should and finds it difficult to fight chest infections. Vitamin D levels in New Zealanders are lower than in people in other developed countries and hospital admission rates for young children with chest infections (e.g. pneumonia and bronchiolitis) are also two to four times higher in New Zealand than in countries such as the United States. This raises the question of whether some of this excess disease is related to Vitamin D deficiency.

What are your research objectives?
Our research will determine if chest infections in early childhood are more frequent or more severe in children who have lower Vitamin D levels at birth.

How you will conduct your research?
We will enroll a sample group of Auckland women during pregnancy and measure Vitamin D on a blood sample collected shortly after the child’s birth. The number of chest infections each child has until the age of two will be documented by interviewing parents and reviewing the children’s medical records. This will determine whether a Vitamin D deficiency influences the frequency or severity of chest infections in the first two years of a child’s life.

Are there others in your field, in New Zealand or globally conducting similar research?
The issue of whether low Vitamin D levels are a cause of poorer health in children and adults is being investigated in other projects in New Zealand and in a number of other countries.

What is innovative about the approach you are taking?
We are enrolling women during the pregnancy and identifying their Vitamin D intake and sunlight exposure during pregnancy as well as the Vitamin D concentration of their babies at birth. We will continue to follow these children as they grow up, allowing us to look at the effect of low Vitamin D levels at birth on a number of childhood health outcomes. To our knowledge no other study is able to do this.

If you are successful with your objectives what will that mean to those suffering from the disease or to the knowledge advancement of this disease?
If low Vitamin D at birth is shown to increase the risk for chest infections in early childhood then this will identify an intervention (e.g. giving Vitamin D supplements to the mother during pregnancy) which will hopefully reduce the number of chest infections in early childhood.

Is there is an international or national collaboration on your project?
We are collaborating internationally with Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

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