High doses of vitamin D may be an effective way to for people to fight infections like HIV-1.
“Vitamin D may be a simple, cost-effective intervention, particularly in resource-poor settings, to reduce HIV-1 risk and disease progression,” researchers write in a new study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For the study, researchers looked at two ethnic groups in Cape Town, South Africa, to see how seasonal differences in exposure to ultraviolet B radiation, dietary vitamin D, genetics, and pigmentation affected vitamin D levels, and whether high-dose supplementation improved deficiencies and the cell’s ability to repel HIV-1.