title: Editorial: Vitamin D and IBD: Can We Get Over the "Causation" Hump?
abstract: Vitamin D deficiency is common in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases and may even precede the disease onset contributing to an increased risk. Using comprehensive data from a large, referral IBD cohort, Kabbani et al. establish that low vitamin D levels are associated with greater disease activity, increased risk of surgery and hospitalizations, and lower health-related quality of life in patients with IBD. This expands the evidence base supporting such an association. However, there is a need for this field to evolve to interventional studies with vitamin D supplementation to confirm that vitamin D has a true therapeutic role for treating disease activity in IBD.
authors.affiliation: Division of Gastroenterology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Ashwin N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Ananthakrishnan
mesh_terms: D006760:Hospitalization; D006801:Humans; D015212:Inflammatory Bowel Diseases; D011788:Quality of Life; D014807:Vitamin D; D014808:Vitamin D Deficiency
chemical_list: D014807:Vitamin D