A Brief History of Nutritional Rickets

Benjamin J Wheeler; Anne Marie E Snoddy; Craig Munns; Peter Simm; Aris Siafarikas; Craig Jefferies

doi:10.3389/fendo.2019.00795

A Brief History of Nutritional Rickets

Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2019 Nov 14:10:795. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2019.00795. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Benjamin J Wheeler^{1

2}, Anne Marie E Snoddy³, Craig Munns^{4

5}, Peter Simm^{6

7

8}, Aris Siafarikas^{9

10

11

12}, Craig Jefferies¹³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Women's and Children's Health, Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
² Paediatric Department, Southern District Health Board, Dunedin, New Zealand.
³ Department of Anatomy, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
⁴ Institute of Endocrinology & Diabetes, Children's Hospital Westmead, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
⁵ Discipline of Child & Adolescent Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
⁶ Department of Endocrinology and Diabetes, Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
⁷ Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
⁸ Department of Paediatrics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
⁹ Department of Endocrinology and Diabetes, Perth Children's Hospital, Perth, WA, Australia.
¹⁰ Division of Paediatrics, Medical School, University of Western, Perth, WA, Australia.
¹¹ Institute for Health Research, University of Notre Dame, Freemantle, WA, Australia.
¹² Exercise Medicine Research Institute, Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, Australia.
¹³ Starship Children's Health, Auckland, New Zealand.

Abstract

Since first described almost a century ago, vitamin D preparations have been successfully used as a public health intervention to prevent nutritional rickets. In this manuscript, we document the periods in history when nutritional rickets was described, examine early efforts to understand its etiology and the steps taken to treat and prevent it. We will also highlight that despite the wealth of historical data and multiple preventative strategies, nutritional rickets remains a significant public health disorder. Nutritional rickets has both skeletal and extraskeletal manifestations. While the skeletal manifestations are the most recognized features, it is the extraskeletal complications, hypocalcaemic seizure and cardiomyopathy that are the most devastating features and result in reported fatalities. Reviewing this history provides an opportunity to further promote recent global consensus recommendations for the prevention and management of nutritional rickets, as well as gain a greater understanding of the well-known public health measures that can be used to manage this entirely preventable disease.

Keywords: history; osteomalacia and rickets' diseases and disorders of/related to bone; public health; rickets; rickets prevention and control; vitamin D.

Publication types

Review