Newswise — Children with severe burns have a diminished capacity to make vitamin D and should receive vitamin D supplements to stop their bones from weakening, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston reported in a study to be published Jan. 24 in The Lancet.
UTMB pediatrics professor Dr. Gordon Klein, the lead author, and his colleagues discovered that children with burns over more than 40 percent of their bodies don't make enough vitamin D on their own to produce strong bones.
Normally, human skin makes vitamin D, known as the "sunshine vitamin," through exposure to sunlight. But in burned children, even skin that's not burned cannot make enough vitamin D, the study found.
"This phenomenon becomes worse with time, rather than better," Klein said.
Burn patients are known to suffer from a high incidence of bone fractures later in life. This research may explain why.
Vitamin D, which helps bones absorb calcium, is crucial to the development of strong bones. Vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteomalacia (soft bones) or, in extreme cases, rickets, a disease of the young characterized by soft and deformed bones.
Children lose bone mass after being burned. Though their bone mass regenerates with time, new bone tissue in burned children isn't as dense as the bone tissue of children who haven't suffered burns.
The researchers studied skin biopsies of 12 children treated at Galveston's Shriners Burns Hospital, which treats children from across the world free of charge. Researchers tracked the patients' vitamin D levels for seven years. They found that burned children's skin becomes so inefficient at producing vitamin D that exposure to sunlight alone wouldn't produce enough vitamin D.
Vitamin D supplements should become part of burned children's therapy during their treatment and after they are discharged from the hospital, Klein said.
Because the study was conducted at a children's burns hospital, researchers didn't have an opportunity to analyze Vitamin D levels in adult burn patients. Nevertheless, Dr. Klein said there was no reason to think the situation would be different for adult burn patients. Still, he said that more research is required to assess for sure whether burned adults' bodies experience similar inabilities to properly synthesize vitamin D from sunlight.
The study, "Synthesis of Vitamin D in Skin After Burns," is scheduled to appear in the Jan. 24 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet. In addition to Klein, the study's co-authors are Tai Chen and Dr. Michael Holick, both of Boston University Medical Center; Dr. Craig Langman and Heather Price, both of Northwestern University; and Mario Celis and Dr. David Herndon, both of UTMB.
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