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Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years

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

#81
post #40

I have thoughts on this 1. Yes, vitamin D actually controls a lot of bodily functions it’s very easily set aside as not a “main” factor when in reality it actually controls a lot 2. This study was done on women in Denmark only which isn’t a great study subject considering Denmark doesn’t get a lot of sun to begin with so most of these women would already start at very low levels 3. This doesn’t directly correlate to…

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…

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

#82
post #24

I'm perhaps missing something but if there were a significant connection, wouldn't this mean those in sunnier climates would have better verbal and visual memory? If there were a connection then I would wager that there are more significant factors, since I have seen or heard of no evidence to assume those in sunnier climates have better verbal and visual memory. The results of this study seem to show no significant…

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Our ancestors started losing their hair about 2 million years ago and the MC1R gene giving us eumelanin pigmentation was fully fixed in the population around 1.2 million years ago by which point we were mostly hairless. In that range is when our vitamin D metabolism evolved, so clothing would have been present for large fractions of our existence.

Going back to a common ancestor with monkeys is pointless because their vitamin d pathways are significantly different like 7-dehydrocholesterol secretions that metabolize to vitamin D via external UV exposure and are ingested during grooming.

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

#84
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.

What I find more plausible is that low sun exposure is one small contributor among many

Yes, I think that too. Besides sports, most young people studying today are aiming for jobs that are mainly indoors. It's not a requirement, of course, but because a lot of modern careers consist of working in offices or other enclosed environments.

No movement, No sun, Stale Air (Unless you have good ventilation). Pretty harmful if we think about it.

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

#85

> 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.

> It's a hypothesis seeking study.

No, it was not.

It was a post-hoc analysis of a different study:

> This is a post hoc secondary analysis of the blinded, placebo-controlled Copenhagen Prospective Studies on Asthma in Childhood 2010 RCT conducted from March 4, 2009, to November 17, 2010.

Also to address this point:

> It just invalidated 8 of them and picked 1 ok-ish candidate to run an actual study in.

I don't quite know what you're talking about, since there were 11 measures looked at in this analysis and many of those measures were somewhat overlapping (various memory tests), so it's dubious to claim that the 1 significance they found means something as opposed to being an outlier they cooked up after shaking up the study data enough different ways.

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

#86
post #60

I have thoughts on this 1. Yes, vitamin D actually controls a lot of bodily functions it’s very easily set aside as not a “main” factor when in reality it actually controls a lot 2. This study was done on women in Denmark only which isn’t a great study subject considering Denmark doesn’t get a lot of sun to begin with so most of these women would already start at very low levels 3. This doesn’t directly correlate to…

> Denmark doesn’t get a lot of sun to begin First, that's only true for about 4 months of the year. Second, people cooped up in offices in China, India, and the US don't get a lot of light either. In fact I'd bet the better work-life balance in Denmark means people actually do get more light there because they spend more of their evenings and weekends outside instead of in the office. Office buildings in Denmark also…

>Office buildings in Denmark also tend to have much better sunlight by design.

Just on this note, you don't make vitamin D if you're indoors even if there's direct sun hitting your skin, because commercial glass filters out UVB.

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

#87
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The vitamin D angle seems much more plausible to me as a public-health issue than as an explanation for broad population-level cognitive differences

Doesn’t that make a feedback loop though? Poor health equals higher health care overhead, lower productivity, more family issues, and overall worse outcomes all over the place. That in turn is going to make educational outcomes worse and child rearing worse. Some diseases can even have lasting cognitive side effects.

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

#88
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

Vitamin D is a also an indicator for sun exposure, which has a myriad of health effects, so vitamin D levels are often correlated with a lot of unrelated variables that need to be accounted for.

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Our ancestors started losing their hair about 2 million years ago and the MC1R gene giving us eumelanin pigmentation was fully fixed in the population around 1.2 million years ago by which point we were mostly hairless. In that range is when our vitamin D metabolism evolved, so clothing would have been present for large fractions of our existence. Going back to a common ancestor with monkeys is pointless because thei…

Thank you for helping remove my ignorance!

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

#90
post #31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they need more vitamin D? I thought they just needed more sun to get the same vitamin D

At these latitudes they just get almost none naturally, that's why you need to supplement more

Ahh, more supplement. I must have misread as more absolute amount
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