Vitamin D Deficiency and Tuberculosis Progression

Tuberculosis is a respiratory illness that usually affects the lungs, but can also infect the kidney, spine, or brain. Tuberculosis can be either dormant or active. Dormant tuberculosis is when you become infected with the tuberculosis bacteria, but you don’t get sick and you’re not contagious. Tuberculosis becomes activated in people with weak immune systems. Vitamin D is an important part of your immune system. Vitamin D can help to increase the amount of good immune proteins that fight and destroy bacteria. People with low levels of vitamin D are more likely to develop dormant tuberculosis, and are also more likely to progress to active tuberculosis. Having high levels of vitamin D may be a way to help prevent tuberculosis infection, but more experiments need to be done to say for sure. Some experiments have shown that people with tuberculosis who take vitamin D supplements have a faster recovery and fewer symptoms. More experiments are needed to determine whether or not vitamin D can help to treat tuberculosis. If you want to take vitamin D to prevent or treat tuberculosis, it is unlikely to cause you any harm, as long as you take less than 10,000 IU per day. If you have tuberculosis, you shouldn’t take vitamin D in place of any treatment medications. Talk to your physician for more advice about taking supplements.