Vitamin D and mental well-being.

Strokes also referred to as ‘brain attacks’ occur when a blood clot blocks an artery or blood vessel, cutting off blood flow to your brain.

A stroke is a serious medical condition that requires emergency care and can cause lasting brain damage, long-term disability, or even death.

When a certain portion of brain stops receiving oxygen-rich blood, a critical casualty, stroke occurs. Deprived of appropriate amount of oxygen, brain cells start to die within few minutes.

If the brain cells are damaged, immediate bleeding might occur which can lead to the development of stroke.

If the brain cells are damaged or have died due to the stroke, various symptoms might occur which are responsible for the malfunctioning of the brain cells. Certain examples include sudden weakness, dizziness, severe headache that occurs all of a sudden, paralysis, numbness of the face, arms or legs, trouble in speaking or understanding speech, vision troubles.

According to the research conducted, scarce levels of Vitamin D are associated with the suffering a lethal stroke, leading to deteriorating health conditions.

The study included about 100 patients suffering from the stroke. They were admitted to a U.S hospital for receiving the treatment for the same. The patients suffered from the ischemic stroke, which is typically caused when the blood flow to the brain gets blocked.

It was studied that patients who had sufficiently low amounts of Vitamin D in blood, almost declining to less than 30 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL), they had about twice the larger areas of dead brain tissues which were affected by stroke than those as compared to the people with normal levels of Vitamin D.

It was also discovered that irrespective of age or severity of initial stroke, for each 10 ng/mL reduction in vitamin D level, the probabilities of recovering fast in the first three months after experiencing the stroke fell almost up to half of the given prospects.

A senior author, Dr. Nils Henninger, assistant professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, said in an American Stroke Association news release that the results they found from their conducted study were motivating enough for the further arduous investigations linking the severity of the strokes with the low levels of Vitamin D in the body. He further added that if their results replicated the previous findings, the next step which would prove rational enough would be to test whether supplementations can protect the patients at a higher risk for stroke.

Dr. Henninger noted that vitamin D affects risk factors such as hypertension and diabetes which play a major role leading to the stroke, or cause the stroke to be more severe.

Another novel research was presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference in the year 2015. Similar research was presented that the stroke patients with low vitamin D levels were more likely to have poor health recovery process after suffering from severe stroke.

Research has exhibited that the Vitamin D levels are associated with hypertension. This has led researchers to become interested in the relationship between stroke and vitamin D.

A parallel study conducted by the team of doctors at NIMHANS (National Institute of Medical Health and Neuro Sciences based in Bangalore offer astonishing and interesting revelations on the condition as they suggested that the Vitamin D deficiency had links to the paralytic stroke.

The study that was conducted looked over the results representing the link between Vitamin D deficiencies with the incidents of the occurrence of stroke. Severely low levels of Vitamin D, below 9.33 ng/ml faced three times the higher risk of suffering from the ischemic strokes as compared to the others.


Particularly, those having a fatal combination of hypertension and Vitamin D deficiency, they were more susceptible to the incidence of Ischemic Strokes according to one of the principle investigators of the research study, Dr. Vijaya Majumdar.

A research group arrived at a conclusion that those having severely low levels of Vitamin D had a higher risk of suffering from the strokes as compared to the people with higher levels of the same.

This study was presented in the Journal of Human Hypertension which assessed the relationship between the lower levels of Vitamin D in the Indian population.

Dr Rita Christopher, professor and head of neurochemistry department at Nimhans, who was part of the study said, “There is a need to get your vitamin D checked regularly and maintain it by being exposed to sufficient sunshine and increase intake of food rich in dietary sources like milk, cheese, mushroom, buttermilk etc. Even non-vegetarian food is very high in Vitamin D. In case vitamin D is very low then one needs to take regular vitamin D supplements and fortified foods.”

Thus, it can be established that optimizing your vitamin D levels is an incredibly powerful way to have a major impact on your health.





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