Posted by Elainep on March 6, 2005, at 14:11:29
In reply to Re: Light box - Vitamin D? » Larry Hoover, posted by barbaracat on March 6, 2005, at 13:36:20
I'm really excited that your doctor is on to something Barbara, and that Vitamin D is being discussed in medical forums. I'll add my two bits worth about dosage but Larry Hoover is right on the money, as I see he always is on these posts! I think my daughter was given 300,000 iu at once. She was really deficient, I guess that's why. Each pill was 50,000iu and she had six of them. Unless each pill was only 25,000. In all honesty I can't remember. So maybe she was given 150,000iu. In Europe, apparently it's common to give out 250,000 at one time. That's why it's important to test your calcium and phosphorus first though, because of something called hypercalceamia which I'm sure Larry Hoover can explain. So yes, with doses as large as 100,000iu and above, it's important to get a prescription from the doctor.
In the meantime though, with some researchers saying we need 4000iu a day, you could try taking that until the results come in. I'm sure it won't do you any harm for a week or so, and may do some good.
Oh, and about the summer question. My daughter started having what looking like cycling bouts of depression just like Quincy described, with three days down and about ten days 'up' (sometimes really up, hyper-up, one night she moved all of the furniture around in her bedroom at midnight for example) and all of that started at the beginning of summer and went through to the autumn when we finally figured out what was wrong. If you've been depleting for years, it doesn't matter when it happens, I think. Another reason it may not be diagnosed as SAD.
What one doctor told me about vit D is that it's involved in regulation of the mood chemicals through the adrenal glands. So it may not be that you're lacking serotonin or the other mood chems, they're just not being dispensed evenly to your brain.
I'm excited that some of you out there are getting tested: I can't say frequently enough how much it changed the life of my daughter. In hindsight now I see she was getting depleted for years: before the actual episodes of depression she had gradually become more and more withdrawn and had become creatively 'blue' (she wrote about very black things): I put it down to teenage angst but now I really wonder.
She also has scoleosis (a curved spine) which, of course, in hindsight, is a latter teenage development form of rickets, the age old sign of vit D deficiency. The only sign that my second daughter (who was also vit D deficient)had in common with my first daughter (Second daughter had no depression/cyclothymia), was they both noticed their jaws had begun to click.
In adults, soft bone pain and lots of cavities can be a sign of it all too. I'm not sure if I've included somewhere else in my posts an article that fybromyaglia can be undiagnosed osteomalacia, or the adult form of rickets from vit D deficiency.
So vit D is seriously big news, great that you're getting tested Barbara and I know it's hard to be patient about it all. But do be patient, you really don't want to megadose if there's any chance of hypercalcemia so it IS important to have the tests done first.
I can't wait to hear how you get on!
Elainep
poster:Elainep
thread:9730
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050304/msgs/467417.html