Does Vitamin D Supplementation Help Heal Hashimoto’s Disease?

Is There a Connection Between Vitamin D and Hashimoto's Disease?  Does Vitamin D Supplementation Help Heal Hashimoto's Disease?
Vitamin D has long been established in literature as a highly essential nutrient with benefit to the musculoskeletal system and bone density. It also functions in the body as an immunomodulator, facilitating normal immune system function and improving resistance against certain diseases.

Given this background, one has to wonder if a deficiency in vitamin D would be prevalent among individuals with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and if so, would supplementation with vitamin D help patients manage the disease or perhaps even prevent it?

PART ONE – Vitamin D Deficiency and Hashimoto’s Disease
Research goes back to 2009 on the first question:  is there a connection between vitamin D deficiency and Hashimoto’s disease?  The earlier studies either indicated that indeed there was a connection while other studies concluded that there was none at all.  How is one to draw a final answer when the outcomes are 180 degrees apart?

Kmiec and Sworczak (2015) reviewed twelve studies published between 2009 and 2014 whereby seven of those studies concluded that there was a connection between lower vitamin D levels and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis while two other studies showed no association and three others were inconclusive.

Among the studies that established a connection included the ones by Bozkurt et al. (2013), Camurdan et al. (2012) and Mansournia et al. (2014).

Goswami et al. (2009)  showed no association between vitamin D levels and thyroid peroxidase antibody (TPO-Ab) positivity.

What was the takeaway message from the Kmiec and Sworczak article?

The authors concluded that no final word on a correlation could be made.  It was neither an absolute ‘yes’ nor a definitive ‘no’. They reported:

“…in many points accumulated data are inconclusive, many unresolved questions remain, therefore, it remains necessary to perform further studies that would affect clinical approaches to thyroid disease.”

They went on to state that the idea of vitamin D supplementation being able to influence the levels of antibodies in Hashimoto’s was also inconclusive:

“Moreover, vitamin D supplementation has not affected disease occurrence in intervention studies, as summarized in 2 recent reviews. The associations between vitamin D deficiency and disease may indicate that 25(OH)D is only a marker of ill health ([Theodoratou et al. 2014]; [Autier et al. 2014]).”

Fast forward a few years, and what does the research reveal on whether there is a connection between vitamin D and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis?

Anaraki, et al. (2017) found no association between vitamin D levels and Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

Boyuk et al. (2016) also reached the same conclusion of no correlation between vitamin D and Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

In 2018, Botelho, et al. reviewed several studies conducted around the world between 2012 and 2016 that basically led to the findings that an association between vitamin D and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis “…remain unresolved in literature”.

Some of these included:

D' Aurizzio, et al. (2015) No differences in vitamin D deficiency in Hashimoto's thyroiditis patients and healthy controls

Yasmeh et al. (2016) No association of vitamin D deficiency and Hashimoto’s relative to controls

On the contrary,

Sun et al. (2017) revealed Vitamin D levels were inversely correlated with positive TPO-ab and higher D levels were linked to lower TSH in males.

Ma et al. (2015) found that there were lower levels of D in Hashimoto's thyroiditis patients relative to controls.

Wang et al's.  (2015) meta-analysis of twenty studies and the Mazokopakis et al. review (2014) also corroborated with Ma’s conclusion that there is an association.

Bozkurt et al.  (2013) found a direct relationship between vitamin D and Hashimoto's thyroiditis.  He and his colleagues looked at 180 Hashimoto's thyroiditis patients...