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Question 2: Is vitamin D useful in the treatment of growing pains?
  1. Ben McNaughten1,
  2. Lynne Speirs2,
  3. Paul Moriarty3,
  4. Andrew Thompson4
  1. 1 Clinical Fellow, Department of Paediatrics, Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, Belfast, UK
  2. 2 Department of Paediatric Infectious Diseases, Great Ormond Street Hospital For Children NHS Trust, London, UK
  3. 3 Department of Paediatric Infectious Diseases, Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, Belfast, UK
  4. 4 Department of Paediatics, Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, Belfast, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Ben McNaughten, Clinical Fellow, Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, Belfast, Northern Ireland31 Millreagh, Dundonald, Belfast BT161TJ, UK; benjamin.mcnaughten{at}belfasttrust.hscni.net

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Clinical scenario

A 6-year-old girl attends your general paediatric outpatient clinic. She describes intermittent pain in both legs over a period of 4 months. The pain is worse at night. She is otherwise well and clinical examination is normal. Blood tests sent by her general practitioner are normal except for a vitamin D level of 35 nmol/L. You make a diagnosis of growing pains and wonder whether there is any evidence to support giving vitamin D in the management of growing pains.

Structured question

Is treatment with vitamin D an effective management option in a 6-year-old girl with growing pains?

Search strategy and outcome

We searched PubMed and Medline (1946–present) using the key words: ‘Vitamin D’ AND ‘child* OR adoles*’ AND ‘growing pains’. The search was performed in June 2017. The results were filtered to include only English articles. The PubMed search yielded 14 results. Following review of the titles and abstracts five articles were identified for full-text review. The Medline search yielded five results. These were the same five articles identified for full-text review in our PubMed search. After a detailed appraisal of these five articles, we selected four papers which we felt adequately addressed the clinical question. No further …

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Footnotes

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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