According to a new study from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), if your teenager has sufficient levels of vitamin D, this not only improves his wellness now, but can affect his future wellbeing. The team found that having the right levels of vitamin D during young adulthood can halve your teenager’s risk of developing adult-onset Type 1 diabetes.
This research could lead to vitamin D supplementation playing a role in preventing this serious life-changing auto-immune disease in adults, as this is the time when your immune system starts to damage your tissues. According to Kassandra Munger, a research associate at HSPH, who led the study, ‘It is surprising that a serious disease such as Type 1 diabetes could perhaps be prevented by a simple and safe intervention’.
For the study, which was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the team of researchers identified 310 individuals diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes between 1997 and 2009, and examined their blood samples, which were taken before onset of the disease. They compared these to the blood samples of 613 people in a control group who did not have the disease.
Type 1 diabetes is a disease where your immune system immune system attacks and permanently disables the cells in your pancreas that are responsible for making insulin. This is a prominent disease in the West in particular, as the American Diabetes Association notes that roughly 5% of the 25.8 million people living in America, for example, suffer from this condition. Though you may think that it begins, more often than not, in childhood, Harvard released a statement which said that approximately 60% of Type 1 diabetes cases occur after the age of 20.
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