Concentrations of serum vitamin D and the metabolic syndrome among US adults

Accumulating research suggests that circulating concentrations of vitamin D may be inversely related to the prevalence of diabetes (1-4), to the concentration of glucose (4-8), and to insulin resistance (4,5,8,9). In addition, vitanim D deficiency may be a risk factor for the metabolic syndrome (8,10), a highly prevalent condition among U.S. adults (11). Much remains to be learned, however, about the relationship between vitamin D status and metabolic syndrome. Because this topic has received scant attention and the available information was derived from a small clinically based sample, we sought to examine the nature and strength of the association between serum concentrations of vitamin D and the metabolic syndrome in a large nationally representative sample of the U.S. population.