Vitamin D deficiency is common in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases and may even precede the disease onset contributing to an increased risk. Using comprehensive data from a large, referral IBD cohort, Kabbaniet al.establish that low vitamin D levels are associated with greater disease activity, increased risk of surgery and hospitalizations, and lower health-related quality of life in patients with IBD. This expands the evidence base supporting such an association. However, there is a need for this field to evolve to interventional studies with vitamin D supplementation to confirm that vitamin D has a true therapeutic role for treating disease activity in IBD.
1Division of Gastroenterology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Correspondence: Ashwin N. Ananthakrishnan, MD, MPH, Crohn’s and Colitis Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, 165 Cambridge Street, 9th Floor, Boston, Massachusetts 02114, USA. E-mail: aananthakrishnan@mgh.harvard.edu
Guarantor of the article: Ashwin N. Ananthakrishnan, MD, MPH.
Specific author contributions: Ashwin N. Ananthakrishnan drafted the entire manuscript.
Financial support: Ashwin N. Ananthakrishnan is supported by funding from the US National Institutes of Health (K23 DK097142).
Potential competing interests: None.
