Vitamin D deficiency factors in fibroid development

Women with vitamin D deficiency are at heightened risk of developing asymptomatic uterine fibroids, a study suggests.

The study looked at premenopausal Han Chinese women and enrolled 133 asymptomatic patients with UFs and 80 women without the benign smooth muscle tumours (controls). Age matching yielded 61 pairs.

All age-matched participants had their medical history assessed and vitamin D concentrations measured. They also underwent transvaginal or transabdominal genital ultrasound scan and blood sampling.

Patients had significantly lower vitamin D levels than controls both in the unmatched (12.1 vs 16.8 ng/mL) and matched samples (11.4 vs 17.5 ng/mL). Furthermore, vitamin D levels were lower in younger women (≤40 years) in the patient group than older women in healthy control group (15.1 vs 19.0 ng/mL).

There was no age–vitamin D interactive effect observed in unmatched samples.

Multivariate logistic regression models confirmed that the presence of asymptomatic uterine fibroids correlated with decreased vitamin D concentrations in both unmatched and matched samples. In addition, the optimal threshold vitamin D level for predicting asymptomatic UFs was 14.34 ng/mL.

Some studies report that vitamin D supplementation may prevent the development and growth of uterine fibroids. As such, vitamin D seems to be a promising, safe, and low-cost approach in the prevention or treatment of these benign tumours. Exploring vitamin D preparations as a new generation of antifibroid drugs is said to be an exciting area of research. [Int J Mol Sci 2018;19:2051]