EDITORIAL
Vitamin D and asthma
Maternal diet vs lack of exposure to sunlight as the cause of the epidemic of asthma, allergies and other autoimmune diseases
1 Harvard Medical School, Respiratory, Environmental and Genetic Epidemiology, Channing Laboratory, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
2 Harvard Medical School, Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr Scott Weiss
Harvard Medical School, Respiratory, Environmental and Genetic Epidemiology, Channing Laboratory, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA 02115, USA; scott.weiss@channing.harvard.edu
Role of vitamin D deficiency in allergic and autoimmune diseases
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Asthma is occurring in epidemic proportions with more than 300 million affected subjects worldwide. In almost all cases the disease has its onset in early childhood, with 80–90% of all cases initially being diagnosed before the age of 6 years.1,2
It was not always so. In the early 1970s the prevalences of asthma and allergy were roughly half of what they are today, and although the onset of the asthma epidemic started insidiously and cannot be precisely documented, it has several interesting and important features that have defied a unified explanation until now. There is clearly a North/South equatorial gradient with Western industrialised countries furthest away from the equator (New Zealand, Australia, the UK) having the highest prevalence worldwide. There is also a clear urban/rural gradient among poorer Third World countries, and a First (industrialised) World/Third World gradient with the lowest asthma prevalence occurring in rural
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