They thought they were doing the right thing by following the recommendations of the midwife who had advised them to provide their newborn with vitamin D (systematically prescribed for growth) in the form of food supplements rather than drugs. His arguments: healthier since of vegetable origin, organic, without preservatives etc. And the young Corsican couple followed his advice.
Three months later, their baby was hospitalized in Bastia hospital, in critical condition. “He was no longer feeding, had lost a lot of weight, was very dejected. But it took the doctors more than 12 days, and a number of tests failing to establish a diagnosis, to finally discover that this baby was in fact the victim of a major overdose of vitamin D.”
Alexandre Gérard is a junior doctor, intern in nephrology but also trained in pharmacology. A double specialty which led him to look into this case reported last summer at the Regional Center for Pharmacovigilance directed by Pr Milou Daniel Drici.
And that he deciphers for us: “Following the advice of their midwife, the parents had replaced the vitamin D drops dosed at 10,000 units per milliliter and prescribed at the rate of 3 to 4 drops per day, with a food supplement (Sunday Natural), marketed on the Internet. The problem is that this product is much more concentrated: it contains 10,000 units of vitamin D per drop – not per ml. gave 30 times the recommended dose!”
Risk of bad ossification
If this baby was saved – “the greatest risk is cardiac arrest” – long-term sequelae are unfortunately not excluded. “Vitamin D overdose causes hypercalcemia (too much calcium in the blood) whose potential long-term effects include bone decalcification and ectopic calcifications (deposits of calcium salts all over the body) especially in the kidneys.
The case of this Corsican baby is not isolated. Recently, our colleagues from Parisian published the testimony of a young mother whose newborn had come close to death for the same reasons. She too had agreed with the opinion of a health professional who had advised her to opt, concerning vitamin D supplementation, for the same brand of food supplement.
“Many families are now victims of the vegan, organic effect…”, observes the young doctor. Following the publication of these two cases, ANSES published an alert on the risks of overdose (1).
Returning from maternity: a risky period
Without casting shame on these food supplements – there are a large number of good quality on the market – the young doctor calls on health professionals to strengthen their role of advice, when they replace a drug with one or more supplements ( s).
“They must clearly show the equivalence of doses in writing. This is particularly important when returning from maternity. The mother and the child return home, with many prescriptions – for both of them. C It’s a difficult period, the mother is tired, stressed, which promotes medication errors.”
Beyond these two recent cases – which might have had a dramatic epilogue – “there are in all likelihood many other cases of complications related to the taking of food supplements which do not go back to CRPV and which also affect adults and more particularly the elderly, who are also very vulnerable”regrets Dr. Gérard.
Less strict specifications
Also, the young doctor wants to drive the point home: “The specifications for food supplements are much less strict than those for drugs; these products are less controlled, and we often end up with random dosages of active ingredients; clearly, on the health professional side, we don’t really know what that we give. But these products continue to be perceived as “good for health”, when the drugs have bad press.”
Hence their success with an ever-wider public, but not always well informed regarding the risks.
1. Vitamin D in children: use drugs and not food supplements to prevent the risk of overdose (ANSES, press release of 01/27/2021)
2. Adverse effects, incidents can be reported to the Regional Pharmacovigilance Center (Alpes-Maritimes (06), Hautes-Alpes (05) and Var (83)). Address: Pavillon Victoria – Cimiez Hospital, 4, avenue Reine Victoria, CS 91179, 06003 NICE CEDEX 1. Telephone: 04.92.03.47.08. Mail: pharmacovigilance@chu-nice.fr.
