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For those who still think that vitamin D is not important enough to justify depigmentation, regardless that it's crucial for bone and neural development, specially in phoetal and child stages of development, here comes yet another critical role: it regulates bactericidal proteins.
In primates and related animals, like squirrels, this anti-bacterial innate reaction is largely dependant on some highly preserved Alu insertion that is regulated by vitamin D. Low vitamin D hence may mean that we get sick more easily and with worse consequences.
Source: Science Daily.
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4 comments:
Mad dogs and ....
Maybe you think a naturally vitamin D3-deficient animal would be short lived, in fact naked mole rats are the longest lived of all rodents.
Prolonged longevity in naked mole-rats: age-related changes in metabolism, body composition and gastrointestinal function
Quote:
@Maximum lifespan of these 40 g rodents (>27 year) is 9 times greater than predicted allometrically. [...]The observed absence of age-related bone loss in naked mole-rats may be explained by their employment of vitamin D-independent mineral metabolism"
Vitamin D and aging.
"Since the phenotype of aged VDR knockout mice is similar to mouse models with hypervitaminosis D(3), our study suggests that VDR genetic ablation promotes premature aging in mice, and that vitamin D(3) homeostasis regulates physiological aging."
Naked mole rats are not humans. They must have a very different metabolism.
The link on vitamin D and aging looks somewhat interesting.
Sorry I got a bit mixed up with that last link, the quote was from a later paper called Premature aging in vitamin D receptor mutant mice.
Here is the correct quote from Vitamin D and aging..
"NF-kappaB and telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) might be molecular mechanisms mediating vitamin D action in aging and cancer. Calcidiol serum concentrations show a U-shaped risk of prostate cancer suggesting an optimal serum concentration of 40-60 nmol/L for the lowest cancer risk. Therefore, it is necessary to study several common aging-associated diseases such as osteoporosis, hypertension and diabetes known to be vitamin D-dependent before any recommendations of an optimal serum concentration of calcidiol are given."
Here is more along the same lines Arterial calcifications and increased expression of vitamin D receptor targets in mice lacking TIF1α
"Interestingly, the fact that these metabolic disturbances correlate with a calcifying arteriopathy and other features of premature aging in TIF1α−/− mice provides support for the hypothesis that aging is promoted by an increased activity of the vitamin D signaling pathway"
Arterial calcifications and increased expression of vitamin D receptor targets in mice lacking TIF1α
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