Vitamin D: Current Status and Perspectives1)
Article in press - uncorrected proof Clin Chem Lab Med 2009;47(2):120–127 ᮊ 2009 by Walter de Gruyter • Berlin • New York. DOI 10.1515/CCLM.2009.036 2009/165 Review Vitamin D: current status and perspectives1) Etienne Cavalier1,*, Pierre Delanaye2, Jean-Paul Introduction Chapelle1 and Jean-Claude Souberbielle3 1 Department of Clinical Chemistry, University The discovery of vitamin D may have begun in Bel- Hospital of Liege, University of Liege, Belgium gium in 1900 when Professor Wildiers from the Uni- versity of Louvain studied the ‘‘bios’’, an organic 2 Department of Nephrology, University Hospital of extract of self-autolyzed yeast. This substance stimu- Liege, University of Liege, Belgium lated the proliferation of yeast (1). In 1912, Casimir 3 Universite´Paris Descartes, Inserm U845, and Funk suggested the name ‘‘vitamine’’ for ‘‘nitroge- Hoˆpital Necker, Service d’explorations nous substances, minute quantities of which are fonctionnelles, Paris, France essential in the diet of birds, man and some other ani- mals’’ (2). In 1921, Funk and Dubin showed that there were two different vitamins present in yeast: the absence of one of these, vitamin B, caused polyneur- itis in birds (beri-beri), while the other, which they Abstract called vitamin D, was the ‘‘bios’’, necessary for the activity of low concentrations of yeast cells. Both vita- The role of vitamin D in maintaining bone health has mins were necessary for the proper growth of rats (3, been known for decades. Recently, however, the dis- 4). At the same time the interest for rickets was covery that many tissues expressed the vitamin D renewed.
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