Vitamin D improves heart function in people with chronic heart failure.
Heart failure is an extremely serious condition, causing unpleasant symptoms of breathlessness tiredness weakness and swelling, but also has a very significant mortality. Medical treatment consists of drugs (ACE inhibitors, beta-blockers and diuretics) but these have limited effectiveness in some patients, and complimentary therapies such as coenzyme Q 10 l-carnitine and D ribose have also been suggested.
A recent study performed in Leeds hospital (the Vindicate trial) offers hope from an unexpected source, namely vitamin D.
In the study 160 patients on full medical treatment were either given vitamin D or dummy tablets for one year. At the end of the year those taking the dummy tablets had no benefit on heart function as measured by a cardiac ultrasound scan, but in the 80 patients who took vitamin D 3 the heart function improved from 26 to 34%.
This is a very major improvement in heart function, probably greater than that achieved by any of the modern medical drugs. One wonders why this has not been trumpeted around the world, possibly because it is a supplement and not a drug. Considering there are more than 900,000 people in the United Kingdom, and over 23 million worldwide suffering from heart failure, this therapy could be an extremely cheap and efficient way of helping many people.
It was presented at the American College of cardiology, 65th annual scientific sessions in Chicago in April.
Anybody suffering from heart failure should undoubtedly be taking additional
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