【Children's Health Series】Vitamin D for infants and young children, the more the better?

Having a newborn at home is really exciting! As a parent, you will definitely want to know how to keep your baby healthy and strong, and vitamin D is often mentioned as a recommended nutritional supplement, but how to supplement vitamin D for infants and young children is better? The latest papers provide a good reference, so keep reading!

Published in 2021 on"The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism"published apaper, whose research team collected detailed information on 812 full-term infants and their mothers, and randomly assigned these infants vitamin D supplementation doses to 400 IU per day (currently recommended supplementation dose) or 1200 IU (high-dose supplementation). ), the supplementation period starts from 2 weeks to 2 years old, and the research team will conduct a complete follow-up at 1 and 2 years old. It will measure the concentration of 25-OH-Vitamin D in the blood of the child and record the Growth situation.

After analyzing the research data, the research team found that the blood 25-OH-Vitamin D concentration of the children in the high-dose supplementation group (1200 IU/day) was significantly higher than that in the normal-dose supplementation group (400 IU/day); Compared with the normal-dose supplementation group, the children in the high-dose supplementation group had slower growth in length and head circumference from 6 months to 1 year old, and faster growth in weight from 1 to 2 years old; In addition, it is worth noting that if the blood concentration of 25-OH-Vitamin D is used as a group, the growth of the group with the highest blood concentration is shorter and lighter than that of the group with the lowest concentration (even after measuring the body length). Correction).

Based on the above research results and previous research data, it can be seen that the vitamin D supplement dosage and the growth status of infants and young children may have an inverted U-shaped relationship with each other, which means:Infants and toddlers may have poorer growth with vitamin D supplementation at too high or too low doses.

The author believes that since the vitamin D intake (1200 IU/day) higher than the recommended amount has no obvious benefit in the research, it is clinically inappropriate.High-dose vitamin D supplementation is not specifically recommended for infants and young children. But to remind all novice parents, since the vitamin D content in breast milk is not high (5~136 IU/L, due to the content in the mother’s body),If infants and young children are exclusively breastfed, it is still recommended to supplement 400 IU of vitamin D daily before one year old; and if infants and young children are fed with formula milk, since formula milk already contains a certain proportion of vitamin D, when the daily intake of formula milk reaches 1 liter, infants and young children can reach the target intake of about 400 IU of vitamin D per day , In other words, if the daily intake of formula milk has not reached 1 liter, it is still recommended to supplement vitamin D in an appropriate amount. (For details, refer toNational Taiwan University Hospital Newsletter)

〈The author is former Attending Physician in National Taiwan University Hospital, and Master of Science from National Taiwan University〉