Vitamin D levels in the blood predict a person’s risk of death, according to a large study of white older adults, which will be presented Tuesday, June 5, at The Endocrine Society’s 89th Annual Meeting in Toronto.

Deficiency of vitamin D was associated with nearly twice the risk of death compared with study subjects who had sufficient vitamin D levels. Vitamin D is important for maintaining bone health, and researchers recently have suggested that it may play a role in general health. Yet vitamin D deficiency is a growing problem worldwide, said Dr. Harald Dobnig, the study’s lead author and professor in the endocrinology department at the Medical University of Graz in Austria.

“This research shows that vitamin D has an impact on overall health status much more than has been appreciated,” he said.

In a study of more than 3,200 men and women with an average age of 62, Dobnig found that 65 percent of the patients had serum levels of vitamin D below the normal range. Those whose vitamin D levels were in the lowest quartile had a risk of death 2.5 times higher than patients with adequate vitamin D. Even when the researchers adjusted for risk factors that are independently associated with death, such as poor heart and kidney function, physical inactivity, diabetes and smoking, the risk was still elevated almost twofold in this group. Patients were followed up more than five years on average, and 611 patients died.

The patients were part of a German study (Ludwigshafen Risk and Cardiovascular Health) of white men and women who had coronary angiograms. Two-thirds of the participants had major heart disease with at least 50 percent narrowing of the heart’s arteries. However, even subjects who did not have major heart disease had a much increased risk of death if they had low vitamin D levels, according to Dobnig. In the overall patient population, low vitamin D levels were linked to an increased risk of death due to heart disease as well as death from any cause.

The form of vitamin D that most predicted risk of death was serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D. This form comes from sun exposure and to a lesser extent from nutritional intake, and is considered the hallmark for determining vitamin D status.

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