PERSPECTIVES
Rickets
Don’t ignore vitamin D
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Prof. N Bishop
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK; n.j.bishop@sheffield.ac.uk
Perspective on the papers by Robinson et al (see page 564) and Das et al (see page 569)
Keywords: rickets; vitamin D deficiency
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Rickets has been cited as the commonest non-communicable disease of childhood worldwide. It is certainly a disease that has been well described over the last four centuries, initially by Glisson (1648), who differentiated it from infantile scurvy, Trousseau (p 38), who identified sunlight and cod liver oil as effective treatments, Mellanby (1919), who created an animal model of rickets that was cured by cod liver oil, and Hess and Unger (1921), who cured rickets in children by exposing them to sunlight on a rooftop in New York.
The epidemiology of rickets—lack of vitamin D from diet and/or the action of sunlight on exposed skin, or of the bone mineral substrates calcium and phosphate—is also well established. The contribution of such deficiencies to other human ill health problems is less clear. There is no doubt that vitamin D is important for function of the musculoskeletal and immune systems, neurological function,
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