ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM,
LEONIDAS SANTANA
A lack of vitamin D in mice appears to drive addiction to both opioids and UV radiation, which share similar molecular pathways, according to a study published June 11 in Science Advances. The result aligns with evidence of a link between vitamin D and opioid abuse the authors generated from patients’ medical records and prior work showing that people can become addicted to UV exposure, pointing to the possibility that vitamin D might help treat both disorders.
“They did a lot of very sophisticated work,” says W. Michael Hooten, a pain medicine researcher and clinician at the Mayo Clinic who was not involved in the study. By first identifying a clinical association between vitamin D deficiency and opioid dependence in medical records and then using animal models to probe the potential neurobiological mechanisms, the paper makes a strong case for using vitamin D in a ...
