Vitamin D and Viral Hepatitis: The New Issue in Pathogenesis and Outcomes

Searching the term “vitamin D” in a database like PubMed results in about 80 000 articles and shows that the number of submitted articles has raised exponentially in recent years. This number about equals the results for “hepatitis B”, indicating that new roles for vitamin D in the body have been proven in recent years. Vitamin D is a vital substance that plays a lot of important roles in the body, e.g., it reduces mortality risk in the elderly,1 it displays anticancer properties,2 and has a regulatory role in calcium and bone homeostasis. Vitamin D is also an important immune modulator that plays important roles in infectious diseases such as viral hepatitis...