LAUSR

A 6-year-old girl attends your general paediatric outpatient clinic. She describes intermittent pain in both legs over a period of 4 months. The pain is worse at night. She is otherwise well and clinical examination is normal. Blood tests sent by her general practitioner are normal except for a vitamin D level of 35 nmol/L. You make a diagnosis of growing pains and wonder whether there is any evidence to support giving vitamin D in the management of growing pains. Is treatment with vitamin D an effective management option in a 6-year-old girl with growing pains? We searched PubMed and Medline (1946–present) using the key words: ‘Vitamin D’ AND ‘child* OR adoles*’ AND ‘growing pains’. The search was performed in June 2017. The results were filtered to include only English articles. The PubMed search yielded 14 results. Following review of the titles and abstracts five articles were identified for full-text review. The Medline search yielded five results. These were the same five articles identified for full-text review in our PubMed search. After a detailed appraisal of these five articles, we selected four papers which we felt adequately addressed the clinical question. No further …