Santiago says she’s still too tired to attend opening of Congress

Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago will miss the opening of the 16th Congress on Monday because of her chronic fatigue syndrome—a debilitating condition that she says has kept her most of the time at home for almost six months.

Santiago said in a press statement that she expects to be back to normal as her doctors, both at the Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, and in Metro Manila, had her undergo a blood test that has finally identified the underlying cause of her chronic fatigue–Vitamin D deficiency.

The blood test made at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City showed that while the normal level for Vitamin D is 30 to 80 units, Santiago had only 17 units.

The senator is expected to take a “megadose”—some 2,000 units daily—of Vitamin D to remedy her deficiency and, hopefully, her chronic fatigue syndrome as well.

“I want to share this information with the millions of Filipinos suffering form chronic fatigue, because in our country, Vitamin D deficiency is often overlooked,” Santiago said.

Santiago also said that her Vitamin D deficiency could also have triggered her hypertension, as discussed at the 2012 annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics.

The 2012 European study also examined the causal relationship between Vitamin D and high cholesterol, which Santiago also suffers from.

Santiago said the link between Vitamin D deficiency on the one hand, and chronic fatigue and hypertension on the other hand, was first broached in 2009 by research doctors such as Dr. Anna Dorothea Hock of Cologne, Germany.

“Vitamin D deficiency is a hidden disorder of high frequency,” Santiago quoted the German doctor as saying.

Following the paper published by the German doctor, a medical team led by Dr. Berkovitz of the University College London, U.K., published a study in the 2012 International Journal for Vitamin and Nutrition Research, recommending that “all patients with moderate to severe chronic fatigue syndrome should be encouraged to have sufficient sun exposure and with foods high in Vitamin D.”

Santiago, over the years, has gone on medical leave from her job as immigration commissioner and as senator because of chronic fatigue.

When Congress adjourned for the campaign break in January, Santiago consulted with, among others, Dr. Bojan Cercek, Director of the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.

According to Santiago’s staff, Cercek said that her blood deficiency was not sufficient to account for her chronic fatigue. The American doctor suggested that she should consult a neurologist and a rheumatologist in the Philippines.

Santiago’s doctors in Manila suggested a test for Vitamin D, which has been increasingly linked in recent medical studies to chronic fatigue, hypertension, and high cholesterol.