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The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

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Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#51

Post by outworlder »

viggity wrote: post #39
jogundas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wiki says that "Hydroxychloroquine is being studied to prevent and treat coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19), but all clinical trials conducted during 2020 found it is ineffective and may cause dangerous side effects." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine

millions of people take HCQ on a daily basis for their lupus. Ask any rheumatologist, the danger of Torsades de Points is only a concern for HCQ if the patient already has a serious heart condition, or if the patient has been taking HCQ for years. Millions more take HCQ as a malaria treatment. It is generally recognized as safe, if you do not have a heart condition (and even then a short course is unlikely to yield a…

> It is generally recognized as safe

There are no safe drugs for a patient admitted to intensive care. We should not start administering anything in large scale just because most healthy people can tolerate it well.

Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#52

Post by clairity »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #29
vorpalhex wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need masks if you are maintaining distance of 6 feet. Masks are for situations where distance can not be maintained such as trains and stores.

6 feet helps . Wearing masks helps . These things do not drop your chances to zero. 6 feet is not a universally applicable number. If you are standing directly down-wind of someone at a park, 6 feet isn’t going to help you. Droplets don’t magically disintegrate at 6 feet. Similarly, if you are up-wind, even 4 feet would be very effective. All of the guidelines are about statistical safety, not about the physics of yo…

> "All of the guidelines are about statistical safety..."

this bit is correct, but the rest is falling for false equivalency by throwing around the same "helps" with every case.

just being outside is overwhelmingly helpful, meaning it overwhelms every other factor by a large margin. relative to that, wearing a mask outside is of such negligible help to be effectively unhelpful. distance also overwhelms masks, both indoors and outdoors. distance outside helps only a little bit, but distance inside helps materially (because the positional and velocity vectors available to droplets and their virii and the dangers to them outside are exponentially greater). masks by themselves indoors are helpful only in limited situations (when in the direct exhaust of others for prolonged periods).

> "...do not drop your chances to zero"

for real-world situations, boolean evaluations like this are nearly always misleading, no matter in which direction. your chances of dying in a bathtub aren't zero either but we don't worry about it. relative magnitudes matter.

yes, use your noggin.

Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#53

Post by JabavuAdams »

arkitaip wrote: post #40
ReflectedImage wrote: post #12

And that's why I've been taking Vitamin D pills for the past 6 months. (It's been suspected for some time to have an effect) This doesn't mean go outside and get covid.

I've been taking Vitamin D3 5000 IU and Vitamin K2 MK-7 100 mcg daily since February to boost my immune system, and I've noticed a radical difference in my colds. I used to get a major cold every 2-3 month and they were really bad lasting two weeks with fever, fatigue, coughs, colds, really stuffy nose, etc. Now? The two colds I've had were over in a week and the symptoms were so incredibly mild - mostly a light runn…

Are you sure you just aren't getting colds because of better hygiene, and less contact with others? Without controlling for social distancing, you can't reasonably conclude that it was the vitamin D.

I haven't had a cold since we initially locked-down in April, which is very unusual for me, but completely explained by social distancing.

Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#54

Post by 131012 »

outworlder wrote: post #41
ReflectedImage wrote: post #12

And that's why I've been taking Vitamin D pills for the past 6 months. (It's been suspected for some time to have an effect) This doesn't mean go outside and get covid.

Be careful. Vitamin D is a hormone and is not risk-free. Unless you have been prescribed by your doctor. In general, be careful with any fat-soluble "vitamins", as they can build up.

A few days ago, a blog post by a physician was stressing this same point. She was suggesting to be especially cautious with high doses.

Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#55

Post by JabavuAdams »

bdamm wrote: post #2

Noteworthy that this is in combination with anti-viral drugs at hospital admission: hydroxychloroquine (400 mg every 12 hours on the first day, and 200 mg every 12 hours for the following 5 days), azithromycin (500 mg orally for 5 days). Regardless, I'm going to assume this means being outside and getting sun is good for me.

Yes.

This study doesn't show that a non-hospitalized person who is not taking hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin should expect better outcomes from Vitamin D. At best, one could argue that if you get hospitalized, it would be good to have built up some Vitamin D.

I'm still supplementing with Vitamin D, though, but may cut back having been reminded that it's a fat-soluble hormone (and not really a vitamin at all).

Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#56

Post by Yver »

nautilus12 wrote: post #4

"Don't go outside, you'll get COVID", sounds more and more like horrible advice. Before knowing the virus died in sunlight, I still couldn't fathom why people were avoiding going out to parks and stuff. It was totally non sequitor.

The patients in this study were not given a prescription of "go outside", they were given vitamin D3 as calcifediol.

Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#57

Post by acqq »

zamfi wrote: post #24
maxander wrote: post #3

From the results: “Of 50 patients treated with calcifediol, one required admission to the ICU (2%), while of 26 untreated patients, 13 required admission (50%) p value X2 Fischer test p Which sounds like as strong a signal as a study of this scale could hope to show.

Yes, this is strong. Worth noting the limitations though: > Randomization generated groups with comparable percentage of unfavorable risk factors as there was no significant difference in subjects with at least one risk factor, except for high blood pressure and diabetes mellitus, known risk factors for unfavorable disease progression [2], which were more frequent in patients not treated with calcifediol. These are H…

The group receiving Calcifediol had more "no bad risk" patients:

"At least one prognostic bad risk factor(@)

Group receiving Calcifediol: 48%

Group without Calcifediol: 61.54%"

"@) Patients with at least one of the following risk factors (age >60, previous lung disease, chronic kidney disease, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, cardiovascular disease or Immunosuppressed and transplanted patients)."

That's what can be concluded from "at least one": (52% had no bad risk in D group, but only 38.46% had no bad risk in the other group). But it is also not clear where there were more patients with "multiple" factors! Or if they were those who had more problems at the end.

The whole paper contains neither raw data nor any graphs and only means and standard deviations, as far as I see? I would personally really like to see the graphs of distributions or to use raw data to check myself.

The critical question is how good the randomization was done.

Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#58

Post by BurningFrog »

outworlder wrote: post #41
ReflectedImage wrote: post #12

And that's why I've been taking Vitamin D pills for the past 6 months. (It's been suspected for some time to have an effect) This doesn't mean go outside and get covid.

Be careful. Vitamin D is a hormone and is not risk-free. Unless you have been prescribed by your doctor. In general, be careful with any fat-soluble "vitamins", as they can build up.

A daily dose of 2000-4000 is enough and is very safe.

42% of Americans are deficient, much more the darker your skin is.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-deficiency-sy...

Re: The First Randomized Controlled Trial on Vitamin D and Covid-19

#59

Post by mortehu »

schoolornot wrote: post #37
mortehu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This experiment compares vitamin D to no vitamin D, and doesn't say anything about those drugs statistically.

Then why introduce two unknown variables into the study?

The point is they are not variables, but rather constants (everyone got them), and they were not introduced, but standard care at the time.

I suspect you have the wrong idea about how the results of the trial are supposed to be interpreted. The point isn't to compare to results outside the study. You should only compare the intervention group to the control group in the same study.

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