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Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

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71–80 of 90 posts

Re: Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

#71

> We found that high-dose supplementation was positively associated with 3 of 11 functions assessed: verbal memory, visual memory, and flexibility or set shift. However, the association with flexibility or set shift was not significant after correction for multiple testing. They tested 11 different measures. Only 3 of those tests showed significance, but after they corrected for multiple testing the significance of 2…

> It's a classic p-hacking trick

It's a hypothesis seeking study. It just invalidated 8 of them and picked 1 ok-ish candidate to run an actual study in.

The only thing wrong here is there's only one format for submitting a paper.

Re: Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

#72
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>car travel, air conditioning, sunscreens even And even clothing.

Tailored clothing is at least 80,000–170,000 years old based on genetic clock research in body lice [1] but archaic humans have probably been wearing hides for at least a million years (there’s currently a big debate about how they managed to migrate to colder climates like Spain 800k-1.2m years ago). I don’t think clothing is that big a factor because all humans in hot environments adapt and very little survives in…

Still, 170,000 - 1.2M years is a fairly short amount of time if we go back only to the common ancestor who begat progeny that would become Pan and Autralopithecus (around 12 million years ago). It could be that early hide wearers started a trend that, to this day, continues to interfere with natural vitamin D metabolism (while also providing many benefits).

Re: Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

#74

> We found that high-dose supplementation was positively associated with 3 of 11 functions assessed: verbal memory, visual memory, and flexibility or set shift. However, the association with flexibility or set shift was not significant after correction for multiple testing. They tested 11 different measures. Only 3 of those tests showed significance, but after they corrected for multiple testing the significance of 2…

Also it was an asthma prevention study, not cognitive functioning one, adding even more "researcher degrees of freedom".

Doing such side studies is fine in itself, but selling such shakey results as "This study suggests that high-dose vitamin D3 supplementation during pregnancy may be associated with improved cognitive functioning at age 10 years." is a stretch.

Re: Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

#75
post #57
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For point 2: I don't think there's really good or bad places to study it, it might not generalize to sunnier places but the reverse is also true. Presumably the scientists working on this can understand these things (I know in my field I'm aware that studies in the tropics will find different things than studies in Canada). For my own point: in this study they have like 22 test values but still use the 95% confidence…

I just skimmed the summary but in the results section it reports three significant results and two after “multiple-test correction”. I’m not sure how they did that correction; I would expect that measures of cognitive performance are correlated for each child and so the standard Bonferroni correction might be too harsh to apply here. > Covariate-adjusted analyses of standardized scores (mean [SD], 0 [1]; higher value…

My statistics isn't great but reading the study more it looks like they control the rate of false positives via the q values so my initial concern may be unwarranted. I'm surprised that it keeps so many barely significant results with so many hypotheses. I'll have to look it up when I get time.

Re: Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

#76
post #55

the Vitamin D cult is a bit insane it is -exactly- like Linus Pauling and Vitamin C cult in the previous century Vitamin D is very important Too Much is as bad as Too Little The "RDA" is too low at 600IU and should have been changed to 2000IU decades ago It can help prevent certain diseases and illnesses It CANNOT cure any known disease or illness once afllicted

You kind of covered this in your last point but it's worth emphasizing: we generally don't know for sure whether "correcting" a low serum vitamin D reading helps out in some way or merely silences a warning beacon that should have been traced to a more serious underlying condition.

Re: Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

#77

> We found that high-dose supplementation was positively associated with 3 of 11 functions assessed: verbal memory, visual memory, and flexibility or set shift. However, the association with flexibility or set shift was not significant after correction for multiple testing. They tested 11 different measures. Only 3 of those tests showed significance, but after they corrected for multiple testing the significance of 2…

> It's a classic p-hacking trick It's a hypothesis seeking study. It just invalidated 8 of them and picked 1 ok-ish candidate to run an actual study in. The only thing wrong here is there's only one format for submitting a paper.

And if the 1 ok-ish candidate study turns out to have significant results, publication bias has to be considered: that dozens or more other studies of vitamin D (or whatever) may have not found significant results of previously ok-ish hypothesis candidates and those negative studies are often not published.

I think this is quite the case for vitamin D which has multiple physiologic roles and is studied extensively for relation to many categories of health issues. One more reason why it can be stunningly impressive when something/anything health-related is eventually proven.

Re: Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

#78
post #21
post #2

I'm not sure if there are any research showcasing the effects humanity has had in general due to low sun exposure. From all the benefits of Vitamin D and the recent human behavorial shift leading to low sun exposure (car travel, air conditioning, sunscreens even), there are bound to be new biological or psychological changes humanity is experiencing for the first time.

I've wondered for a while if the apparently higher cognitive performance and resulting societal wealth at higher latitudes might be some kind of second order side effect from long-term selection for lower sun exposure. We already know this vitamin D is almost certainly why Northern peoples evolved lighter skin. (I realize this is a frought topic, so please hold the race science bullcrap replies or the over-reactions…

[deleted]

Re: Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

#80

> We found that high-dose supplementation was positively associated with 3 of 11 functions assessed: verbal memory, visual memory, and flexibility or set shift. However, the association with flexibility or set shift was not significant after correction for multiple testing. They tested 11 different measures. Only 3 of those tests showed significance, but after they corrected for multiple testing the significance of 2…

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