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Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

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Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#151

Post by pow_pp_-1_v »

devaboone wrote: post #143
wpasc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by "wacky" levels? I can't tell from your comment if that means high or low. Asking as a Vitamin D supplement user who uses 2-3k IU a day

Hi, I'm the wife. High dose Vitamin D can cause elevated calcium levels (meaning over 10.0 mg/dl for adults over 40, it can be a little higher for younger adults). I usually don't see that occur with doses at 2-3 K IU daily. You can also check your Vitamin D 25-OH levels (the level that will be done if you just get a standard "Vitamin D level") and these should be in a reasonable range. What constitutes reasonable ma…

What are the ill effects of elevated blood-calcium levels? Is there a way to avoid the bad effects of high dose Vitamin D supplements? Thanks!

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#152

Post by seamyb88 »

conorh wrote: post #89

I've mentioned this before, but my wife is a parathyroid surgeon (parathyroids are the glands that regulate the calcium in your neck) and would beg you to PLEASE monitor your calcium levels if you are supplementing with Vitamin D. She often sees patients on high doses of Vitamin D from well intentioned doctors, but with out of whack calcium levels because of it, and the patients can be very sick without understanding…

I recently stopped taking my (self-prescribed) dose of 1,000 IU Vitamin D3. Before this I was on 2,000. I work all day and rarely leave the house, sometimes for a couple of weeks. I thought I was doing the sane thing.

A good number of months in and I start getting all of the symptoms - lethargy, constipation, stomach and intestinal pain, urinating very frequently and feeling like I had a kidney infection.

Bloods came back all normal, including vitamin D and calcium. My symptoms chime so much with Vitaminosis D (Vitamin D toxicity) that I wonder whether the serum levels are accurate indicators of such toxicity. Vitamin D is stored in fat and the calcium gets deposited in muscles - two possible mechanisms for this.

However, I do not know for sure. Either way I have been scared sh!tless of self-prescribing anything else. No matter how mundane it seems.

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#153

Post by davidwitt415 »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #78

I've been very frustrated in my attempts to raise this issue with the local health department where I live. I was brushed aside, and was told "correlation does not imply causation". I doubt that the person on the phone wanted to get into a conversation about dynamical systems or nonlinear data analysis, so I didn't even go there. Instead I sent a letter full of references to published research, and citing other lette…

A simpler explanation is profit motive; it doesn't 'pay' to promote free/low cost alternatives. Most of western medicine is geared this way, imo.

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#154

Post by zamfi »

d_burfoot wrote: post #28
et2o wrote: post #5

Vitamin D has been endlessly promoted as a treatment for many diseases due to evidence from observational studies, but hundreds of millions of dollars in randomized controlled trials have never demonstrated it to be effective for any disease except rickets. There was just a large trial published in JAMA [1] examining its effectiveness for depression given solid observational data. It was not at all effective. The rea…

My view is that sunlight is the confounding effect. Getting substantial exposure to the sun has many health benefits, probably including Covid resiliency, and also increases vitamin D levels in the blood. So vitamin D correlates with, but does not cause, those health benefits. How is it even plausible that sunlight does not have significant health benefits, given that Europeans evolved to have pale skin because they…

> How is it even plausible that sunlight does not have significant health benefits, given that Europeans evolved to have pale skin because they lived in high latitude environments?

No one is arguing that sunlight doesn’t have benefits. We just don’t know if those benefits are mediated through vitamin D (in which case supplementation could be enough!) or something else.

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#155

Post by devaboone »

mellosouls wrote: post #134
conorh wrote: post #89

I've mentioned this before, but my wife is a parathyroid surgeon (parathyroids are the glands that regulate the calcium in your neck) and would beg you to PLEASE monitor your calcium levels if you are supplementing with Vitamin D. She often sees patients on high doses of Vitamin D from well intentioned doctors, but with out of whack calcium levels because of it, and the patients can be very sick without understanding…

Without a reference to go by a quick Google indicates toxicity is only likely by taking far above recommended levels (max recommended is 4000iu daily) for an extended period. Presumably people on those kind of doses are taking it under medical supervision, or are idiots/under the control of idiots. I am not a doctor, but without further information it seems that as ever, following the guidance on legit supplies speci…

There are some very vocal people who argue that the risk of toxicity is very low. The studies aren't great. But for most people, taking a moderate dose of Vitamin D will be safe. Unfortunately, I have treated many patients who come to me with high calcium levels due to taking Vitamin D. They do not have parathyroid disease (I have treated thousands of patients with parathyroid disease). They have simply been taking high doses of Vitamin D. High dose is generally 5000 units a day or more, though I have seen it occur with lower doses if taken over many years. Vitamin D is fat soluble, so it will stay in your system for a long time, building up. Of note, some of those patients were instructed by their doctors to take those high doses. Even doctors forget the relationship between calcium and Vitamin D, and I have spoken with doctors who did not realize that 5000 units a day could cause problems. As a doctor, there is a lot to know and remember, and most doctors haven't studied calcium metabolism in many years.

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#156

Post by andy_ppp »

devaboone wrote: post #143
wpasc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by "wacky" levels? I can't tell from your comment if that means high or low. Asking as a Vitamin D supplement user who uses 2-3k IU a day

Hi, I'm the wife. High dose Vitamin D can cause elevated calcium levels (meaning over 10.0 mg/dl for adults over 40, it can be a little higher for younger adults). I usually don't see that occur with doses at 2-3 K IU daily. You can also check your Vitamin D 25-OH levels (the level that will be done if you just get a standard "Vitamin D level") and these should be in a reasonable range. What constitutes reasonable ma…

If taking Vitamin D do you recommend Magnesium and K2 as well, as I understand it these need to be in balance?

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#157

Post by James_Henry »

glofish wrote: post #82
mrfusion wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When vitamin D is produced in the body naturally via exposure to sunlight there's a huge amount of other things that occur as well Any further reading on that? On the other hand worth supplementation you don’t get the harmful uv rays.

UV rays should not be considered harmful de-facto! Overexposure to UV rays is what causes trouble. Slathering on the sunscreen even when not necessary (like walking from point A to point B, or spending 15 minutes outside, is what causes the predominant vitamin D deficiency in the first place.

Are you sure the "predominant vitamin D deficiency" isn't caused by the prevalence of metabolic syndrome?

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#158

Post by krspykrm »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #128
credit_guy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found out on HN that the official daily recommended dose for vitamin D is flawed, it was based on an erroneous statistical analysis. [1] contains some details. The bottom line is the daily dose should be about 8000 IU rather than the official 400 IU. Obviously, 250000 IU or 500000 IU is much higher, but this is a one-shot, not a daily dose. If you take 8000 IU daily dose as correct, then those 2 megadoses correspon…

A few things. Whenever your conclusion is that the "official recommendations are flawed", and those were in place for a while now, scrutinize your process. Reading a post on social media is rarely paradigm-changing - and when it is, it's overwhelmingly in the wrong direction. Secondly, the 8k dose doesn't seem realistic historically. Is there any diet that does not include the products of modern tech, that gets anywh…

> Secondly, the 8k dose doesn't seem realistic historically. Is there any diet that does not include the products of modern tech, that gets anywhere near those levels consistently? Doesn't seem likely.

Because historically most vitamin D intake didn't come from diet, but from sunlight exposure. Varying widely depending on how much skin you're exposing, the color of your skin, latitude, season, etc., estimates of vitamin D hourly vitamin D synthesis can be on the order of tens of thousands.

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#159

Post by crawfordcomeaux »

devaboone wrote: post #143
wpasc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by "wacky" levels? I can't tell from your comment if that means high or low. Asking as a Vitamin D supplement user who uses 2-3k IU a day

Hi, I'm the wife. High dose Vitamin D can cause elevated calcium levels (meaning over 10.0 mg/dl for adults over 40, it can be a little higher for younger adults). I usually don't see that occur with doses at 2-3 K IU daily. You can also check your Vitamin D 25-OH levels (the level that will be done if you just get a standard "Vitamin D level") and these should be in a reasonable range. What constitutes reasonable ma…

Does this material affect your advice?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28768407/

Re: Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]

#160

Post by devaboone »

ColanR wrote: post #102
conorh wrote: post #89

I've mentioned this before, but my wife is a parathyroid surgeon (parathyroids are the glands that regulate the calcium in your neck) and would beg you to PLEASE monitor your calcium levels if you are supplementing with Vitamin D. She often sees patients on high doses of Vitamin D from well intentioned doctors, but with out of whack calcium levels because of it, and the patients can be very sick without understanding…

Right now, I'd rather have a calcium problem than a Covid-19 problem. Also, some of the studies being thrown around in this discussion have mentioned that safe levels of Vitamin D are much higher than a lot of medical professionals actually think. > there is virtually no risk of toxicity in supplementing up to 10,000 IU of vitamin D3 daily https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

I read the study that is cited on your link. It was a review article about Vitamin D, not a study on Vitamin D toxicity. And in fact, in the references for that article, there is no study cited directly related to Vitamin D toxicity that I can see. The cutoff at 10K is largely someone's opinion. I cannot say how many people will be harmed by taking such a high dose, but I know with certainty that toxicity at that dose is not rare, because I see it all the time. Some people can take very high doses and be just fine, calcium stays normal. Others will take 5000 units daily and end up with high calcium, and all the symptoms that go along with that (including kidney stones, fatigue, cardiac arrhythmias, etc). Now I am not saying that NO ONE should take high dose Vit D. Some people actually need that high dose, but that is only in the case of someone with very low Vit D and low calcium levels - often in someone who has problems with intestinal absorption, as you would see in someone who had a gastric bypass, for example.
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