A professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital says. I'd like to talk with you about vitamin D and COVID-19. Is there potentially a protective role? We've known for a long time that it's important to avoid vitamin D deficiency for bone health, cardiometabolic health, and other purposes. But it may be even more important now than ever.
There's emerging and growing evidence that vitamin D status may be relevant to the risk of developing COVID-19 infection and to the severity of the disease. Vitamin D is important to innate immunity and boosts immune function against viral diseases. We also know that vitamin D has an immune-modulating effect and can lower inflammation, and this may be relevant to the respiratory response during COVID-19 and the cytokine storm that's been demonstrated. There are laboratory (cell-culture) studies of respiratory cells that…
