Vitamin D screening in patients with inflammatory bowel disease

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are at increased risk of developing vitamin D deficiency for a variety of reasons. However, it is not routine practice to monitor vitamin D levels in these patients. In all patients, deficiency is most likely to be evident at the end of winter or early spring. This article describes a retrospective audit carried out to determine whether vitamin D serum levels had been measured in 100 randomly selected outpatients during late winter/early spring 2015, and then to identify the prevalence of deficiency in patients who had been screened. The main results showed that, overall, only 20% of patients with Crohn’s disease (CD) and 8% of patients with ulcerative colitis (UC) had a vitamin D result recorded. Of these, 80% of the patients with CD and 75% of the patients with UC had insufficient levels of vitamin D (<20 ng/ml), compared with 47% of healthy controls shown in other studies. This audit shows that very few IBD patients had their vitamin-D levels measured; however. the prevalence of insufficiency was high.