Vitamin D in the New Decade: Facts, Controversies, and Future Perspectives for Daily Clinical Practice

Dear Colleagues,

Vitamin D has been the focus of ongoing scientific research over the past two decades. Its undisputed primogenetic role in bone mineralization has been expanded to a strikingly disparate amalgamation of transparent scientific cases and observational studies, randomized controlled trials of dubious design, and sporadically personal aphorisms and dogma. This phenomenon configures a burgeoning scientific field in which substantial controversy is inevitably reflected in daily clinical practice, resulting in a precarious interpretation of not necessarily available results, lifestyle-affected vitamin D supplementation in vitamin D sufficient populations, and ineffective dosing and time regimens.

In this context, somewhere in between the dipole of inordinate enthusiasm and critical opposition, the vast majority of healthcare providers worldwide, who are involved in some part of the developed vitamin D agenda, postulate a sound individualized scientific approach unbiased from quandaries and oriented to improve long-term health outcomes and patient quality of life—beyond the Platonic caves of available knowledge in the field.

This Special Issue will draw attention to all the intriguing and conflicting aspects of vitamin D research, including the following: Vitamin D deficiency and its widespread epidemiology; musculoskeletal and extra-skeletal effects; and critical updates on published vitamin D supplementation prevention RCTs (cancer/CVD). It will also include discourse on the future agenda with the main questions: What has changed so far in the field? What are future research milestones? In collecting the results reported here, the editors have not endeavored to achieve any sort of completeness, but rather to shed light on the ongoing controversy of the vitamin D “friendly” perspective versus vitamin D skepticism, with a discourse on clinical implications and physicians’ daily decision making into the beginning of the new decade.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Nutrients. 

Dr. Spyridon N. Karras
Guest Editor

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• vitamin D
• nutrition
• infections
• epidemiology
• cardiovascular disease