Personalized Vitamin D Supplementation in European and African Americans

The proposed study is a randomized, double-blind, controlled, multi-center clinical trial of six months of daily oral vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol). This study will randomize 334 community-dwelling post-menopausal women of European and African descent (\~167 from each ancestry) in a 1:1 ratio between the control arm and the dosing algorithm arm using stratified block randomization with a block size of six and stratification by site (ancestry). The sample size of 334 includes 10% over-recruitment to allow for loss to follow-up. The European ancestry women will be seen in the Madison clinic and the African ancestry women will be seen in the Milwaukee clinic. The proposed study will focus on post-menopausal women because this is the subset of the population that both Dr. Engelman\'s and Dr. Binkley\'s preliminary data are drawn from. Moreover, 25(OH)D concentrations are typically lower in women and in older individuals, since production of vitamin D in the skin following sun exposure decreases with age. Therefore, this group of individuals is likely to benefit the most from vitamin D supplementation, especially when personalized based on biology using the proposed dosing algorithm.