In this monologue, Dr. David Perlmutter emphasizes the critical importance of maintaining adequate vitamin D levels for brain health. He reviews scientific literature linking low vitamin D to neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease, noting vitamin D’s role in activating brain pathways that clear debris. He then discusses a recent mouse study where dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) induces colitis, leading to weight loss, gut inflammation, and shrinkage of the hippocampus—a brain region whose atrophy is associated with Alzheimer’s. The study found that vitamin D supplementation protects mice from DSS‑induced gut inflammation and prevents hippocampal shrinkage, apparently by regulating the gut microbiome and preventing dysbiosis. Dr. Perlmutter concludes that vitamin D’s ability to maintain a diverse, healthy gut microbiome may be a key mechanism linking gut health to brain degeneration, and he strongly recommends testing vitamin D levels and supplementing when deficient.
Chapters
Hi everyone, Dr. David Perlmutter here. I've been talking quite a bit recently about the virtues of vitamin D and why it's really important to have adequate amounts of vitamin D in your blood, how blood testing for vitamin D is actually very, very important, and I've been doing so by looking at the scientific literature that finds really low levels of vitamin D correlating with things like Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, and even Alzheimer's disease. We've puzzled really for quite some time as to what that relationship is all about. We do know that vitamin D plays a role in allowing the brain to activate pathways that can help it clear itself of debris, but we have some newer information, a newer piece of the puzzle I think that's really quite interesting. A recent study is entitled Vitamin D Regulates the Gut Microbiome and Protects Mice from Dextran Sodium Sulfate Colitis. Let me break that down. When mice are given dextran sodium sulfate, a chemical, in their drinking water, they develop colitis. And one of the studies that I use in many of my presentations demonstrates that When the mice are given this chemical and develop colitis, several things happen. Number one, you see that they lose weight. Number two, inflammatory cells migrate into the lining of the gut. But number three, and I think very importantly, is we've noted in the research that their brains shrink, specifically the memory center of the brain called the hippocampus. In other words, inducing inflammation in the gut of the laboratory animal using this chemical, dextran sodium sulfate, has the far-reaching effect of causing shrinkage of the memory center. Now, why is that important for us? Because we know that as the memory center, the hippocampus, shrink, that correlates with Alzheimer's. It's one of the findings that we see on MRI scans that correlates with the degree of— Alzheimer's. Cognitive impairment that we see in Alzheimer's disease. Well, this is an important study because in the presence of vitamin D, these laboratory animals that were given this chemical that would otherwise have produced inflammation are very, very resistant to that inflammation. Now, what the authors concluded, and I'll quote, our data demonstrate that vitamin D regulates the gut microbiome And that vitamin D or deficiency of the vitamin D receptor results in dysbiosis— I'll explain— leading to greater susceptibility to injury in the gut. Dysbiosis is an alteration of the gut bacteria. So we're just beginning to put the pieces together in terms of mechanisms that move forward, explain to us why vitamin D turns out to be so important for the brain. And it might just be that one important piece of the puzzle is the importance of— The gut. Vitamin D in terms of regulating and maintaining a good diversity of organisms in the gut and helping the gut be resistant to a breakdown of its lining, therefore resistant to creating inflammation in the body that can then affect the brain. So again, I'm all in when it comes to having your vitamin D levels checked and to taking a vitamin D supplement to make sure your vitamin D level, if it's low, gets up to, to ranges that are acceptable. I'm Dr. David Perlmutter. Thanks for joining me.
