Vitamin A deficiency: Treatment & Prevention
Treatment of Vitamin A Deficiency:
Vitamin A deficiency should be treated urgently as early as possible. Treatment should be very prompt and vigorous. Massive dose of vitamin A should be given, which usually reverses all the eye manifestations of vitamin A deficiency. The massive dose is about 200,000 international units (IU) or 110,000 micro grams (mcg) of retinol orally on two successive days. At this very high dose recovery occurs very fast and sequel of vitamin A deficiency can be avoided.
Prevention of Vitamin A Deficiency:
Prevention of vitamin A deficiency is generally done in two forms. First is to improve people’s diet to ensure a regular and sufficient supply of vitamin A in the regular diet. Secondly to reduce the factors that contribute to vitamin A deficiency like protein energy malnutrition (PEM) diarrhea (reduces absorption of vitamin A), respiratory tract infections measles (increases the demand of vitamin A due to increased requirement of vitamin A in maintaining the normal epithelial lining of respiratory tract, urinary tract etc.) and infectious diseases like. Both the forms of prevention and control of vitamin A deficiency are of long term and require community participation and nutrition education of the community.
The good news is that vitamin A can be stored in the body that last up to 9 months which is liberated slowly over time and can take important role in prevention of vitamin A deficiency. The vitamin A store which can last up to 9 months helps in planning cheap and effective strategy to prevent vitamin A deficiency. In developing countries like India where vitamin A deficiency is highly prevalent has developed simple technologies (National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, India developed simple technology) for effective control of vitamin A deficiency. The technique is base on giving large dose of 110,000 micrograms of vitamin A as retinol palmitate orally to children of 1 to 6 years of age every 6 months. This strategy is giving excellent result in India and many other countries and it is also very cheap. This way it can be said that the children are “immunized” for 6 months against xerophthalmia.
The protection that is afforded by this large single dose of retinol or vitamin A is adequate as seen in the improvement of clinical signs of vitamin A deficiency in the community as a whole. In one of the longitudinal study in Hyderabad, India where the technique is developed, showed that the reduction of keratomalacia is about 80% in the area.