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Trial Lecture – time and place
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Adjudication committee
- First opponent: Professor Stefania Maggi, The National Research Council (CNR), Italy
- Second opponent: Associate Professor Ole Kristian Grønli, The Arctic University of Norway
- Third member and chair of the evaluation committee: Professor Elisabeth Gulowsen Celius, University of Oslo
Chair of the Defence
Professor II Lise Solberg Nes, University of Oslo
Principal Supervisor
Professor Nenad Bogdanovic, University of Oslo
Summary
Dementia, especially due to Alzheimer`s disease (AD), is a major and increasing health problem in the elderly population worldwide. To date there is no curative treatment. It is therefore crucial to examine all possibly modifiable factors for disease development; vitamin D deficiency is one of them. There are conflicting results regarding vitamin D and cognitive function in the literature, and little is known about the presence and impact of vitamin D in the human brain.
The aims of the thesis were to explore the possible significance of both serum and intrathecal Vitamin D for cognitive health in older persons, by investigating associations with cognitive performance, volumetric MRI measurements, serum/cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) ratios, VDR gene polymorphisms and biomarkers for AD and cytokine levels in CSF.
Lower levels of vitamin D in serum were associated with worse performance on cognitive tests of executive function and lower volumes of cortical grey matter.
Although almost all persons had normal levels of vitamin D in serum, patients with a clinical diagnosis of AD had lower levels of vitamin D in CSF compared to the control group.
Lower levels of vitamin D in CSF were associated with pathological levels of tau protein and phosphorylated tau protein, but not with β-amyloid in CSF. We did not find a consistent association between polymorphisms of vitamin D receptor with vitamin D levels or cognition, nor an association between vitamin D levels in CSF and selected cytokines in CSF.
The results of this study support the hypothesis that vitamin D is an important part of brain health and raise the question of whether vitamin D in the brain can have a metabolism that is partly independent of its metabolism in blood.
Additional information
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