Bone-bending rickets can now be added to the list of ills linked to children spending uncounted hours before a computer screen, British researchers said Friday.
Youngsters with rickets, caused primarily by a chronic lack of vitamin D, develop painful and deformed bow-legs that do not grow properly.
The condition is linked mainly with extreme poverty and the 19th-century Victorian England of Charles Dickens, and can be easily avoided through a balanced diet and exposure to sunlight.
But doctors reported this month that cases of the debilitating disease have once again become “disconcertingly common” in Britain.
“Kids tend to stay indoors more these days and play on their computers instead of enjoying the fresh air,” said Simon Pearce, a professor at Newcastle University in northeast England and lead author of a new study on Vitamin D deficiency.
“This means their vitamin D levels are worse than in previous years,” he said in a press release.
Half of all adults in Britain — especially in the north — have Vitamin D deficiency in winter and spring, with one-in-six having severe deficiency.
The condition has been linked to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, several kinds of cancer and a soft-bone condition in adults called osteomalacia.
While the study focused on Britain, the same trend is likely elsewhere in the industrialised world, the researchers suggested.
The Report: Clinical Review – Diagnosis and management of vitamin D deficiency (BMJ)
I doubt it is the sun exposure. Yes, we can make vitamin D from being out in the sun, but it must be a certain kind of sunlight that only occurs in the middle of the day when the sun attains a certain position in the sky. You are far, far more likely to get that right kind of sun exposure closer to the equator and during the summer than you are in the higher latitudes, especially in a place that is as habitually cloudy as the UK is.
It is more useful to look at the diets of these kids. What aren’t they eating anymore that they used to eat?