VITAMIN D IN THE PREVENTION OF - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Associate Director
• Professor

Carol L. Wagner, MD, is Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Director of the Clinical and Translational Research Center (NEXUS) at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina. Dr. Wagner is a board-certified neonatologist whose research focuses on understanding the vitamin D requirements of pregnant and lactating women and their infants and the long-term impact of vitamin D deficiency on health. She received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and her medical degree from Boston University of School of Medicine in 1986. Since completing her pediatrics residency and neonatal-perinatal fellowship at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York in 1992, she has been in the Department of Pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Working with Dr. Bruce Hollis, she has been co-PI of a number of vitamin D studies sponsored by NIH and the Thrasher Research Fund, and most recently, by the Kellogg Foundation, focusing on eliminating racial disparities in vitamin D status during pregnancy and early childhood. Relevant to their research, Drs. Hollis and Wagner showed that unique to pregnancy, total circulating 25-hydroxy-vitamin D directly affects the active hormone 1,25(OH)2D such that optimal concentrations are achieved when 25(OH)D is at least 100 nmol/L. Further, the team has demonstrated an association between the health status of pregnant women, comorbidities of pregnancy, and vitamin D status. More recently, their findings from a recent NICHD lactation trial showed maternal vitamin D supplementation alone with 6400 IU/day safely repletes breast milk with adequate vitamin D to satisfy the requirement of her nursing infant and offers an alternate strategy to direct infant supplementation.

Lorenz Borsche, born in Heidelberg in 1954, studied physics / mathematics as well as sociology / political science in Heidelberg, was co-founder of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in 1977, assistant to GL at ADI Software GmbH in 1988/89 and then worked as an independent system consultant. Since 1991 WWS for bookstores, since 1998 co-development of an internet shop system with WWS connection, 2000 foundation of the bookseller cooperative eBuch eG, until spring 2011 general representative (GF), since then board member of the eG.

Job Titles:

• Director, Sunlight, Nutrition, and Health Research Center

William B. Grant has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He had a 30-year career in atmospheric sciences with an emphasis on developing and using laser radar (lidar) systems for remote sensing of atmospheric constituents with positions at SRI International, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and NASA Langley Research Center. He turned to health research in 1996, using the ecological approach to link dietary factors to risk of Alzheimer's disease, resulting in the first paper linking diet to risk of Alzheimer's disease (Grant, 1997). His next ecological study found that while animal fat was an important risk factor for coronary heart disease for men, added sugar (sweeteners) were for women (Grant, 1998). In 1999, he obtained a copy of the Atlas of Cancer Mortality in the United States, 1950-94 (NIH Publication No. 99-4564) and noticed that for many types of cancer, mortality rates were much higher in the northeast than in the southwest. Building on the work of the brothers Cedric and Frank Garland, he used NASA satellite data for solar UVB doses in July 1992 in ecological studies to show that 13 types of cancer (eight more than previously identified) had mortality rates inversely correlated with UVB doses (Grant, 2002). After retirement from NASA in 2004, he moved to San Francisco and formed the nonprofit organization Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center. He has published several additional ecological studies related to the association of UVB and various cancers, autism, and dental caries, and several ecological studies on diet and Alzheimer's disease, cancers, and rheumatoid arthritis. He has also carefully examined how observational studies and randomized clinical trials are conducted regarding vitamin D, resulting in several publications pointing out limitations of such studies and how they can be improved.