The Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health’s (ISEH), Dr Snehal Pinto Pereira, Associate Professor in Population Health and Applied Statistics, has led research investigating whether variation in vitamin D status causally influences muscle strength. This study was conducted in collaboration with other researchers from ISEH (Dr Tom Norris), UCL (Drs Victoria Garfield and Dylan Williams), University of Cambridge (Dr Stephen Burgess), and Newcastle University (Dr Richard Dodds and Profs Avan Sayer, Sian Robinson and Rachel Cooper).
Low vitamin D levels are very common, as is muscle weakness. These two public health challenges are of particular concern in ageing populations and may be related. Therefore, the authors decided to explore the shape of the relationship between circulating vitamin D levels and grip strength using data on almost half a million people from the UK Biobank study.
This work, in particular its investigation of non-linear effects using two different methods to increase confidence in findings, is novel as most previous observational studies exploring the relationship between vitamin D and muscle strength assume a stable dose-response association. This is despite the fact that the relationship may not be linear with the implication that potential effects of vitamin D supplementation on strength could vary by underlying vitamin D levels.
“Our findings are important for the aetiological understanding of muscle weakness and its treatment and prevention” said Dr Snehal Pinto Pereira commenting on the study results, “while we found evidence supporting causal links between circulating vitamin D levels and grip strength, in terms of magnitude of association, this effect is likely to be moderate to small.”
Read the published paper in the Oxford Academic, featured in The Journals of Gerontology.