Rickets is not just caused by calcium deficiency

Rickets is a disease that many people are not familiar with. This type of disease is quite harmful to human health. After suffering from such a disease, it must be treated in time, otherwise the patient's condition will become more serious. There are many reasons for suffering from such a disease. Depending on the patient's condition, the cause of the patient's disease is also different, so the treatment methods are also different. Calcium deficiency can cause such a disease, but rickets is not only caused by calcium deficiency.

Rickets is caused by many reasons, and rickets is not only caused by calcium deficiency. Therefore, when treating such a disease, it cannot be treated in a single way, but must be treated according to the specific situation.

Rickets is not just caused by calcium deficiency:

Misconception 1: Rickets is called "calcium deficiency"

The vast majority of parents believe that rickets is caused by calcium deficiency and that rickets can be prevented by calcium supplementation. Although this misconception has decreased a lot compared to the past, it still exists.

Vitamin D deficiency rickets is a chronic nutritional disease mainly caused by insufficient vitamin D in the body, which leads to abnormal calcium and phosphorus metabolism. "Calcium deficiency" is secondary to vitamin D deficiency. Of course, some children simply suffer from insufficient calcium intake, or both. In other words, insufficient VD, insufficient calcium intake, or both can lead to rickets, and the most common is VD deficiency. Therefore, it is inappropriate to call rickets calcium deficiency, which can easily cause misunderstanding.

Due to such misunderstandings, some parents attach great importance to calcium supplementation without the guidance of a doctor. They give their children various kinds of calcium without supplementing them with sufficient VD. The result is ineffective calcium supplementation. On the contrary, excessive calcium supplementation cannot be effectively utilized and is excreted in the stool, which not only wastes the drug source, but also leads to constipation in children, affects gastrointestinal function, and causes anorexia in children.

Misunderstanding 2: Children with rickets have low blood calcium levels

This understanding is not comprehensive enough, because vitamin D deficiency can lead to two conditions, one of which is vitamin D deficiency rickets, which mainly manifests itself in the bones.

Blood calcium may be within the normal range or slightly low. One type is VD deficiency tetany, which is more common in infants under six months old and has low blood calcium as the main manifestation. This is mainly because when VD is deficient, the compensatory secretion of the parathyroid gland is also insufficient, which cannot restore hypocalcemia, resulting in symptoms of hypocalcemia. Therefore, blood calcium levels are not necessarily low when suffering from rickets.

Misconception 3: There is a gap between preventing rickets and treating rickets

The prevention of rickets is to give preventive medication to children before they develop rickets, maintain their daily physiological needs, and prevent the occurrence of rickets.

Once you have rickets, you need treatment. The amount of VD and calcium used to treat rickets is very different from that used for preventive treatment. Even if the condition stabilizes after treatment, preventive medication is still needed.

The above is a detailed introduction to the fact that rickets is not only caused by calcium deficiency. There are many other causes of rickets. Moreover, when treating this type of disease, patients also need to actively cooperate so that they can control their own disease well and prevent the disease from continuing to develop.