Shedding Light on Vitamin D Status and Its Complexities during Pregnancy, Infancy and Childhood: An Australian Perspective

Nelfio Di Marco, Jonathan Kaufman and Christine P. Rodda
Additional contact information
Nelfio Di Marco: Women’s and Children’s Division, Sunshine Hospital, St Albans, VIC 3021, Australia
Jonathan Kaufman: Women’s and Children’s Division, Sunshine Hospital, St Albans, VIC 3021, Australia
Christine P. Rodda: Women’s and Children’s Division, Sunshine Hospital, St Albans, VIC 3021, Australia

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 4, 1-17

Abstract: Ensuring that the entire Australian population is Vitamin D sufficient is challenging, given the wide range of latitudes spanned by the country, its multicultural population and highly urbanised lifestyle of the majority of its population. Specific issues related to the unique aspects of vitamin D metabolism during pregnancy and infancy further complicate how best to develop a universally safe and effective public health policy to ensure vitamin D adequacy for all. Furthermore, as Australia is considered a “sunny country”, it does not yet have a national vitamin D food supplementation policy. Rickets remains very uncommon in Australian infants and children, however it has been recognised for decades that infants of newly arrived immigrants remain particularly at risk. Yet vitamin D deficiency rickets is entirely preventable, with the caveat that when rickets occurs in the absence of preexisting risk factors and/or is poorly responsive to adequate treatment, consideration needs to be given to genetic forms of rickets.

Keywords: Vitamin D deficiency; rickets; vitamin D during pregnancy; foetal life; infancy and lactation; UV B; sun exposure; health literacy; mineral ion nutrition; vitamin D dependent rickets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/4/538/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/4/538/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:16:y:2019:i:4:p:538-:d:205538

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().