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Researchers say children with higher vitamin D levels in their blood have fewer asthma symptoms. Getty Images

Vitamin D may help ease asthma symptoms for obese children living in urban environments with loftier indoor air pollution.

Recent research from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland constitute that having low levels of vitamin D was associated with respiratory issues from indoor air pollution in obese children in urban areas.

The researchers examined 120 children over a 9-calendar month menstruation in the Baltimore surface area. They tested the vitamin D levels in the blood of the children, their asthma symptoms, and the level of air pollution in their homes.

Of the 120 children involved in the inquiry, all had preexisting asthma, and 1/3 were obese.

"Baltimore is one example where urban minority populations in the U.S. suffer disproportionately heavy brunt of asthma. We know from our prior work that indoor air pollution is a significant contributing factor to asthma symptoms, especially among urban children who spend the majority of their fourth dimension indoors," Sonali Bose, MD, study author and assistant professor of medicine in the Partitioning of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, told Healthline.

"There'south emerging scientific literature in support of the protective role of vitamin D in asthma, and therefore we wondered if low vitamin D levels in children with asthma might make them more than vulnerable to the furnishings of indoor air pollution," added Dr. Bose, who'due south also on the adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins. "By identifying individual risk factors, such every bit dietary factors, that may potentially exist modifiable, we can begin to find ways to protect children from harmful effects of air pollution in the future."

The researchers found that in homes with the highest levels of indoor air pollution, children who were obese and had higher blood vitamin D levels had fewer asthma-related symptoms.

Co-ordinate to the U.S. Centers for Illness Command and Prevention, 6.i million American children, or well-nigh i in 12 children, take asthma. Asthma disproportionately affects urban minorities, including African-American children.

Bose says the reasons behind the college rates of asthma among African-American children remain a puzzle to researchers, merely it is likely due to multiple reasons, including vitamin D deficiency.

"There are many factors that may contribute to the heavy burden of asthma in urban blacks, including but not express to disproportionate exposures to environmental factors such every bit pollution, obesity, poor nutrition, genetics, and other yet-unidentified factors," she said. "Vitamin D deficiency is also unduly present amidst black children, potentially due to a combination of poor diet and darker pare pigmentation, which blocks the product of vitamin D in comparison to lighter skin tones."

In 2015, near 2.6 million non-hispanic blacks reported having asthma. In 2014, African-Americans were well-nigh 3 times more probable to die from complications due to asthma than their white counterparts.

African-American children were 10 times more likely than white children to die from complications due to asthma than those in the white population in 2015. Black children are also four times more likely to be admitted to a hospital due to asthma than white children.

Tonya Winders, president and primary executive officer of the Allergy and Asthma Network, says further research into why African-American children are disproportionately impacted past asthma is important.

"We truly exercise not fully understand if it is genetics, environment, or both that crusade higher rates of asthma in children of colour. It could exist college rates of pollution or allergens. It could also exist lack of access to adequate healthcare or fiscal resource," she told Healthline.

Urban children are particularly vulnerable to indoor air pollution due to the significant corporeality of time they spend indoors.

Incense, smoke from cooking, cigarette fume, and candles can all worsen symptoms of asthma in children. Such environmental triggers tin crusade wheezing, tightness in the chest, and breathlessness.

"A child with asthma has inflammation in their airways along with constriction of the muscle in their airways, causing narrowing of these breathing tubes, making it much harder to breathe. It is essentially like animate out of a straw," Purvi Parikh, Doc, a spokesperson for the Allergy and Asthma Network, and an allergist in New York City, told Healthline.

Contempo research has suggested there may be a link betwixt vitamin D levels and asthma.

In 1 report, researchers compared asthma diagnoses, vitamin D levels. and lung role in ten,000 children and more than than 24,000 adults. They plant that low levels of vitamin D among those studied were associated with a diagnosis of asthma besides every bit reduced lung part.

The role of vitamin D in bone forcefulness has been well established, merely researchers believe the vitamin too plays an important office in the production of insulin also as in the functioning of the immune organization.

Experts says it isn't merely obese children in urban environments whose asthma, and overall health, may be influenced by their vitamin D levels.

"Many studies have shown vitamin D helps non only asthma but all inflammatory weather condition," Dr. Parikh said.

"Both obesity and air pollution are risk factors for poor asthma control. Vitamin D, nevertheless, may aid mitigate that risk. This underscores the importance of normal levels," she said.