Vitamin D: A Repurposed Anti-inflammatory Drug at the Cardiovascular Level

Abstract

Drug discovery and development are usually very costly and time-consuming. Therefore, drug repurposing is an attractive option for treating multiple diseases due to significantly reducing the time and costs invested in these tasks while using less risky compounds. Moreover, drug repurposing may help to discover new drug targets and signaling pathways that may be therapeutically exploited. Such is the case of vitamin D (or hormone D), which has recently gained relevance in clinical and experimental medicine with an impact on pathologies other than the phosphocalcic mechanism. In this sense, there is accumulated evidence that supports that -from now on- vitamin D (or more recently called hormone D) should be recognized both for its vascular anti-inflammatory actions as well as its bone effects. Likewise, this compound could be proposed as a new therapeutic alternative in the prevention and treatment of hypertension, atherosclerosis, and many other vascular inflammatory diseases due to the possibility of being used as a repurposed drug.