Cell-based study reveals vitamin D can drive ... myelin repa
Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 2:49 pm
The authors found that neural stem cells carry receptors that can bind to vitamin D. When they added vitamin D to the cell culture plates, the neural stem cells increased their numbers significantly after one week, demonstrating that vitamin D triggers neural stem cells to activate and multiply. Importantly, vitamin D stimulated the neural stem cells to mature into both neurons and myelin-forming oligodendrocytes, but not astrocytes. The mechanism by which vitamin D activated neural stem cells was through promoting increased activity of several important neurotrophic factors.