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Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

mdpi.com

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Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#81

Post by xenophonf »

MDPI follows an author-pays model, which incentivizes it to accept all submissions instead of publishing only good-quality work. In fact, this publisher is highly suspect, as it has allegedly pressured peer reviewers to accept low-quality work for publication in the recent past:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/open-access-editors-r...

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/be...

I would treat this paper with, at most, the same skepticism as a preprint. Vitamin D supplementation is so easy and inexpensive, that if this correlation is truly that strong, I'd expect to see it in The Lancet or Nature or any one of the other mainstream journals.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#83

Post by rriepe »

andi999 wrote: post #26

I remember that there also was the result that supplementing does not help if you have covid. So to me it looks just like correlation and not causation (old sick people do not go out often and have less vitamin D. Probably same reason while you can find health benifits for alcohol: sick people stop drinking )

This is because of the lag time of Vitamin D. It takes six weeks to change your levels. Since the course of Covid is lower than that, it's generally not helpful if you start supplementing after getting it.

There are enough "long hauler" cases where you still should, though.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#84

Post by daxelrod »

mrandish wrote: post #57

When the third supportive pre-print paper was released in late April I started my elderly mother on a D3 supplement. As more papers came out in May I started my whole family on it. I read up on dosing and it's pretty hard to overdose unless megadosing over a sustained period of time and negative reactions/interactions are rare. We've been supplementing ~5k to 10k IU daily (total, incl any multi-vitamins) depending on…

> Of course, the usual warnings about consulting your medical provider and more of a good thing is not always 'better' apply, so be careful not to over do it.

For anyone who is curious, the NIH's daily upper limit for adults of Vitamin D is 4000IU https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-Consumer/ . (I assume that mrandish already knows this, this is for others' benefit).

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#85

Post by jugg1es »

Relatively small sample and, considering almost half of US citizens are vitamin D deficient, you can't rule out boring correlation (and not causation).

EDIT: Why does HN have these downvote trolls? I was a bio major and was trained to critically analyze studies just like this. Skepticism is part of science. Why would you downvote my comment?!

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#86

Post by nucleardog »

ryandvm wrote: post #54
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #10

It's unfortunate that it is not simple to get regular tests for vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The whole process seems to be stuck behind the doctor appointment firewall. This might be one of the reasons why Theranos was so readily believed. As the quantified self movement that gained popularity around the same time showed, there's an appetite in certain segments of the population for this type of testing and trac…

I've often wondered if it would be economically feasible for blood donation banks to do this as a perk/incentive for giving blood. Every 6 months or so, you donate blood and as part of the process you get run-of-the-mill bloodwork report emailed to you a few days later. You'd have to make sure you weren't creating an incentive for sick people to donate blood just for the lab work, but otherwise it seems like it would…

Seems like that could easily work places with universal healthcare. Very little incentive to donate for free lab work when any medically necessary lab work would be done for free anyway.

And second that, would happily donate in exchange for curiousity-fulfilling bloodwork.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#87

Post by luckyorlame »

moonbug wrote: post #30
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #10

It's unfortunate that it is not simple to get regular tests for vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The whole process seems to be stuck behind the doctor appointment firewall. This might be one of the reasons why Theranos was so readily believed. As the quantified self movement that gained popularity around the same time showed, there's an appetite in certain segments of the population for this type of testing and trac…

It is, in the civilised world with functioning healthcare infrastrucure.

Good point

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#88

Post by colechristensen »

orangecat wrote: post #39
Exmoor wrote: post #3

I must admit I was completely ignorant of the effects of Vitamin D deficiency on common illnesses such as the flu as well as how unbelievably common that deficiency is for people living in much of the northern hemisphere. Will it cure COVID19? No. But do I think there's a decent chance it will improve my outcome while simultaneously improving my ability to fight off other viruses. I am honestly completely shocked tha…

Yes. I won't be surprised if we eventually determine that advocating Vitamin D supplements would have been one of the most beneficial strategies we could have implemented. But it's a "drug", and therefore "unethical" to recommend without years of studies even though we know that it has effectively zero risk.

You can overdose on vitamin D and it can have significant side effects.

More or less anything that can have a positive effect on your health can have a negative effect if done wrong. If something has no possible negative effects it probably doesn’t do anything at all.

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#89

Post by [deleted] »

ryandvm wrote: post #54
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #10

It's unfortunate that it is not simple to get regular tests for vitamin and mineral deficiencies. The whole process seems to be stuck behind the doctor appointment firewall. This might be one of the reasons why Theranos was so readily believed. As the quantified self movement that gained popularity around the same time showed, there's an appetite in certain segments of the population for this type of testing and trac…

I've often wondered if it would be economically feasible for blood donation banks to do this as a perk/incentive for giving blood. Every 6 months or so, you donate blood and as part of the process you get run-of-the-mill bloodwork report emailed to you a few days later. You'd have to make sure you weren't creating an incentive for sick people to donate blood just for the lab work, but otherwise it seems like it would…

[deleted]

Re: Vitamin D insufficiency may account for almost 90% of Covid-19 deaths

#90

Post by jberryman »

Exmoor wrote: post #3

I must admit I was completely ignorant of the effects of Vitamin D deficiency on common illnesses such as the flu as well as how unbelievably common that deficiency is for people living in much of the northern hemisphere. Will it cure COVID19? No. But do I think there's a decent chance it will improve my outcome while simultaneously improving my ability to fight off other viruses. I am honestly completely shocked tha…

> I am honestly completely shocked that we haven't seen governments and the media increasing people's awareness of this issue.

The fact that it hasn't been picked up by journalists and public health officials should rather be reason for you to be skeptical of early research cherry-picked by random programmers on the internet... the same people that were blowing up HN with hydroxychloroquine stories just a few months ago.

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