Interesting paper in Archives of Disease in Childhood. 'Education on safe sun exposure and oral vitamin D supplementation or food fortification, should be considered for key target groups, including adolescent females and pregnant and lactating women.'
CITATION: Vitamin D deficiency in South-East Asian children: a systematic review
https://adc.bmj.com/content/107/11/980?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email...
ABSTRACT
Objective: To describe the prevalence and determinants of vitamin D deficiency (VDD) among healthy children aged between 0 and 18 years living in South-East Asia (SEA).
Design: We systematically searched Ovid MEDLINE and Ovid EMBASE for observational studies assessing VDD among healthy children in the SEA region as the primary or secondary outcome from database inception to 6 April 2021. PubMed was used for e-pubs and publications not indexed in Medline. Publications that included abstracts in English were included. We performed a systematic review to describe the prevalence of VDD in SEA children.
Results: Our initial search identified 550 publications with an additional 2 publications from manual screening. Of those, 21 studies from 5 different countries (Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia) were summarised and included in forest plots. The prevalence of VDD (<50 nmol/L) ranged from 0.9% to 96.4%, with >50% of newborns having VDD, and severe VDD (<30 nmol/L) ranged from 0% to 55.8%. Female sex and urban living were the most common determinants of VDD.
Conclusions: VDD among healthy children living in the SEA region is common. Efforts to detect VDD and the implementation of preventive measures, including education on safe sun exposure and oral vitamin D supplementation or food fortification, should be considered for key target groups, including adolescent females and pregnant and lactating women to improve the vitamin D status of newborns.
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