Vitamin D For Children with CKD | Why it’s Important & How Much to Take

This video is about vitamin D for children with CKD and what is a healthy good dose and how high you can go with vitamin d. Vitamin d is a fat soluble nutrient that a very high percentage of people are low in who have kidney disease.

A lot of people are deficient. They’re low in this vitamin when you have kidney disease because the kidneys convert into the active form of vitamin d, so if you have kidney disease you’re not converting like you should and so vitamin d is so important. We know it does dozens and dozens and dozens of good things when it comes to your kidney health. It helps your parathyroid levels stay in a more normal range, it helps have less protein in the urine, less protein urea, it helps with proper calcium absorption, it helps keeps your bones strong. A problem with kidney disease you can develop weak bones as time goes on so vitamin d keeps your bones strong.

It slows down the loss of kidney function. So when they put vitamin d and they give it to people with variety of kidney diseases it slows the loss of function so you lose kidney function faster if you’re deficient in vitamin d. So vitamin d plays so many important roles when it comes to kidney health that most people are going to need to take it and it’s really important. When it comes to children, we’ll talk about the optimal doses or what are some good doses that you can take.

This piece of research is from the Pediatric Nephrology Journal February 2022 and it’s titled “randomized trial two maintenance doses of vitamin d and children with chronic kidney disease.” So they found children that had deficiencies in vitamin d with chronic kidney disease and they broke them up into two groups. One group they gave a thousand ius 25 micrograms of vitamin d the second group they gave 4 000 ius of vitamin d. That is a pretty high dose, we even have adults that take those high doses. What they found with the thousand ius they weren’t able to correct the deficiency. They weren’t able to raise the vitamin d3 levels high enough to be out of the low range out of the deficiency range, but when they gave 4000, that was an adequate dose to get them into a normal range where you experience all those good positive benefits that i spoke about.

So if you have a child with kidney disease make sure they get their levels tested and a thousand ius probably isn’t going to do it. You want to go to as high as 4000. If you don’t feel comfortable starting that high you can start with maybe 2000 or 3000 ius. The main thing is that you’re most likely going to need a higher dose for your child for any children with kidney disease and to get tested. Take the vitamin d for 60 days and go get tested again or whatever amount of time your doctor tells you to come back and get tested.