Welcome back everyone. Well, we are the end of summer now and when you think about summer, not only does it keep us warm, especially being out in the sunshine, but it also provides us with a very important supplement, vitamin D. – [Narrator] A major new study of nearly one million people finds the lower your vitamin D levels, the higher your risk for certain diseases, including a 35% increase risk of death from heart disease and a 14% increase in death from cancer. Vitamin D not only helps block a host of major illnesses, it can boost your heart and even strengthen your bones. This while an estimated two thirds of the population isn’t getting enough. Doctors say try to get about an hour a week in the sun, but you have to take precautions not to get too much. And you can get vitamin D by eating more salmon, mushrooms and fortified dairy. For middle-aged and older women, vitamin D supplements can help, too. – Food sources are really limited so it’s best for most people to take a supplement. – [Announcer] Experts say the best thing to do is get outside and soak up some sun. – And now doctors at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University are studying the role too little vitamin D plays when it comes to eye diseases and injuries. The cornea is in a prominent position for risk from injury whether it’s when you’re doing your mascara and you stab yourself in the eye or if you’re in an accident of some sort. Corneal specialist Dr. Amy Estes and Dr. Mitch Watsky, the dean of the graduate school at AU are with me now. And, you know, how interesting. Vitamin D and your eyes. – We were doing some work with bone and skin looking at vitamin D and because of my longstanding work in the cornea, we were curious as to whether or not, because the cornea is the only other organ exposed to the sun, whether it could make and activate vitamin D. And we discovered that sure enough it could. – Now I know when you’re talking about vitamin D in the skin, I’ve heard before, you know, maybe be outside, maybe 10 minutes with no sun block, just so you can get the vitamin D production going. Does that mean you need to be outside with no sunglasses or is it okay if you have your sunglasses on? – So you can have your sunglasses on. You can take them off for a little bit if you want. Some of the UV radiation can get around the sunglasses and the other thing that we discovered is that you can also get vitamin D from your diet that makes it way to the eye. – So, that’s like a different path. – Exactly, exactly. And the important thing is that the cells in the cornea can activate the vitamin D and be able to utilize it, for example, to help healing in the epithelium of the cornea, which are the cells that face the tear and the outside environment. – And it’s probably susceptible to so much, different infection. We were joking just a little while ago about pink eye. I guess you’re rubbing your eye, you can expose anything to that. – Sure, so any kind of trauma, a scratch on the eye, or an injury to the eye, infections, that’s really the first layer that they kind of attack and thinks like that. So it’s really, you know, the first line of defense in terms of eye health and the surface of the eye. So it’s really exciting that there might be a compound or a product that could help heal faster. So, whenever you have a scratch on the eye or anything like that, you can potentially get bacteria or infection in there just like you could if you had a scratch on your skin. So if there were a way to heal that layer more quickly, that would be great from a clinical standpoint. – And you’re saying vitamin D is what could give it that boost? – That’s what we’re hoping. – That’s what you’re hoping and would taking the supplements help in the same way as being outside without sunglasses? – So what our thought is that probably in people who have normal vitamin D levels, that additional vitamin D probably isn’t going to be that helpful, that it’s mainly going to be important for those people who are deficient or insufficient in vitamin D, that bringing it up to a normal level either through diet or through some kind of supplementation in the eye could be very helpful. – So many people walk around vitamin D deficient, so there’s a lot of that going on, too. – Exactly, the estimates are there was a study called Nhaynes that estimated that as much as 75% of adolescents and adults in America are vitamin D insufficient or deficient. – And don’t you think that has to do with this right here and people playing video games all the time and playing on computers and not playing outside, like we all say we did when we were young. (laughing) We make it sound like our mothers put us outside and locked the door, don’t we? – They pretty much did. – There’s nothing wrong with that, right? – But I mean is there a correlation do you think? – Absolutely. There are a number of studies that have shown for example that people who live in northern latitudes where it’s really cold and they’re wearing a lot of clothes or don’t go outside a lot have much lower vitamin D levels than people in the south who do tend to wear short sleeves, short pants and get more sun exposure. – Makes sense, makes a lot of sense. What do you encourage for women in terms, because vitamin D is different with women and women’s health. – Sure, so I mean lots of primary care doctors and OBYGNs have recommendations in terms of vitamin D for bone health and things like that, especially as women age, so it’s, you know, very important to continue your calcium and vitamin D supplementation, you know, as would be recommended by your primary care provider and certainly as you age, different recommendations in terms of vitamin D levels for overall women’s health. – I think that we all get to that age where we’re talking about osteoporosis and preventing all of that and then taking the special drugs that, you know, are really like mega vitamin D to help that situation. Now, I want to ask you one more thing. Where do you get the corneas? I mean, how are you doing your research? – So, we’re doing animal research on the one hand, where we’re primarily using mice and those mice have been genetically modified so that typically vitamin D won’t actually work on them. So we can see what happens when you have no vitamin D around. And then the other half of what we’re doing is we use cell culture where we use donor corneas. So what we use is what’s leftover after they use the transplant part of the cornea. So, Dr. Estes will do a cornea transplant and there’s a small part of the tissue that’s left over that we then get to grow the cells off of. – You do so much great research there at the Medical College and we’re lucky to have you in our community for sure. – Thank you so much and thank you for having us. – Yeah, thank you for having us. – Absolutely. Don’t go away,