Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Medicine - Department of Pediatrics

Itamin D, the sunshine vitamin, has received a lot of attention recently as a result of a meteoric rise in the number of publications showing that vitamin D plays a crucial role in a plethora of physiological functions and associating vitamin D deficiency with many acute and chronic illnesses including disorders of calcium metabolism, autoimmune diseases, some cancers, type 2 diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease and infectious diseases. Vitamin D deficiency is now recognized as a global pandemic (Wacker and Holick, 2013).Neonatal sepsis is a clinical syndrome characterized by signs and symptoms of infection with or without accompanyingbacterimia in the first month of life. Early-onset sepsis (EOS) occurs within 3 days of life as defined by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Vermont Oxford Networks (Sahay and Sahay, 2015). Vitamin D has an important role in the regulation of both the innate and acquired immune systems.Newborns are more susceptible to infections as both innate and acquired immune systems are not entirely developed. Therefore, low vitamin D status is expected to be one of the risk factors for early onset neonatal sepsis (Aly and Abdel Hady, 2015). Kumar et al. (2019) determined the possible association between neonatal vitamin D levels and EOS in term neonates. They reported that lower neonatal 25-OHD levels are associated with EOS. Adequate vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy may be helpful to prevent EOS in term neonates

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