The Maren Foundation

The ongoing research investigates whether Vitamin D replacement:1)Helps reduce risk factors for Cardiovascular disease, namely hypertension and high cholesterol.2)Reduces blood clots, such as stroke and deep vein thrombosis.The Hopkins Lupus Cohort is a thirty year longitudinal cohort in which patients are followed by protocol every three months, with over 80,000 clinical visits from more than 2600 individual patients in the cohort database.This quantity of data makes it possible identify risk factors for outcomes, such as cardiovascular events and thrombosis (blood clots) and to tease out the relative importance of disease activity, exposure to corticosteroids, and low vitamin D as risk factors for these events. The research results would help lupus because vitamin D would reduce potentially two of the three main risk factors (lupus activity and traditional cardiovascular risk factors)that contribute to the excess risk of cardiovascular disease in SLE.