Regular Research ArticlesVitamin D Deficiency Is Associated With Low Mood and Worse Cognitive Performance in Older Adults
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Participants
This is a cross-sectional study of older adults participating in studies of cognitive and functional aging at the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) at Washington University. The ADRC recruits cognitively healthy and demented older adult participants from the greater metropolitan St. Louis, MO, area (population: 2.5 million). Participant recruitment occurs through public service announcements (radio, TV, and print media), requests to private physicians and organizations (e.g., the St.
RESULTS
The sample characteristics at the time of serum collection used for vitamin D determination are shown in Table 1. When the participants are divided into groups by vitamin D status (sufficient, insufficient, and deficient), differences were found in CDR Sum of Boxes, presence of active mood disorder, SBT scores, PPT scores, and age using analysis of variance (Table 2). No difference was found in MMSE, depressive features scores, or factor scores.
In the adjusted analyses (Table 3), vitamin D
DISCUSSION
In this study of older adults without significant functional disability, vitamin D deficiency was associated with low mood and worse performance on two measures of cognitive function. This study also found that 58% of the participants had vitamin D levels below the sufficient range. This finding is similar to prior reports of the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency older adults1, 6 but lower than a report by Sato et al. of vitamin D deficiency in persons with AD.7
Participants in this study with
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This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health: K12 HD01459 (CHW), P01 AG03991 (JCM), P50 AG05681 (JCM); and the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Charitable Trust (CHW/JCM).
We thank Dr. Martha Storandt for providing the cognitive assessment data. We are also indebted to the Clinical and Genetics cores of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center for providing the diagnostic data and serum used in this report.