It’s an essential vitamin that your body uses for normal bone development and maintenance; it also plays a role in your nervous system, musculoskeletal system and immune system.
Vitamin D plays a crucial role in maintaining the balance of calcium in your blood and bones and in building and maintaining bones. With vitamin D deficiency, a decline in calcium and phosphorus absorption by your intestines leads to hypocalcemia (low calcium levels in your blood). This leads to overactive parathyroid glands attempting to keep blood calcium levels normal. If severe, thos can cause symptoms, including muscle weakness and cramps, fatigue and depression.
To try to balance calcium levels in your blood your body takes calcium from your bones, which leads to bone breaks down faster than it can reform. This can result in soft bones in adults and rickets in children.
Severe lack of vitamin D in children causes rickets. Symptoms of rickets include: incorrect growth patterns due to bowed or bent bones, muscle weakness, bone pain and deformities in joints. Children with a mild deficiency may just have weak, sore and/or painful muscles.
Lack of vitamin D isn’t quite as obvious in adults. Symptoms might include fatigue, bone pain, muscle weakness, muscle aches or muscle cramps and mood changes like depression.
In general, the two main causes of vitamin D deficiency are not getting enough vitamin D in your diet and/or through sunlight. There are also several medical causes of vitamin D deficiency.
Your skin's ability to make vitamin D decreases with age, so people over the age of 65 years are especially at risk. Infants are also at risk. This is especially true for infants who are only fed breast milk, as it contains only a small amount of vitamin D. It’s more difficult for dark-colored skin to make vitamin D than light-colored skin, so people with darker skin are at a higher risk. People who are homebound or rarely go outside aren’t able to use sun as a source of vitamin D.
While you might consider eating more foods containing vitamin D and getting more sunlight you can just take vitamin D supplements.
