Insufficiency of Vitamin D in adolescents of the South of Brazil
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Abstract
This article examines vitamin D insufficiency among adolescents in southern Brazil. It summarizes prevalence, potential determinants such as sun exposure and diet, and implications for bone health, calling for targeted prevention and screening strategies.
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Copyright © 2018 William Cordeiro de Souza et al.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Corresponding author: Correspondence: William Cordeiro de Souza, University of Contestado (UnC), Porto União, SC, Brazil —
Competing Interests
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Funding
No specific funding statement was provided by the authors.
Data Availability
No data-availability statement was provided by the authors.
Citation:
Introduction
Vitamin D is primarily attributed the role of important regulator of osteomineral physiology, especially calcium metabolism. This vitamin can be obtained through the exogenous form in the diet or the endogenous synthesis from the cholesterol that is synthesized from the incidence of ultraviolet rays of the sun on the skin. In a study1 conducted by Brazilian researchers with 234 female adolescents from the South of Brazil, aged 7 to 18 years, they reveal that the habits of modern life, far from the sun, contribute significantly to vitamin D insufficiency. researchers have shown that more than 80% of the girls evaluated have vitamin D levels below the recommended, that is to say, four out of five girls lack vitamin. The data found in southern Brazil serves as an appeal to parents, since the lack of vitamin D in children and adolescents can lead to early bone deficiency, diabetes, and some cases of cancer and obesity.