Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe Covid-19 • Hacker News Board

Re: Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe Covid-19

#301

Post by zamfi » Mon, May 04, 2020, 12:29 AM UTC

Harvesterify wrote: post #297

zamfi wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I consider that paper to be pretty weak evidence -- as elsewhere, it shows a hypothesized connection via some intermediaries: they show Vitamin D inhibits inflammatory cytokines, but then presume that this inhibition must therefore help avoid hypercytokinaemia (cytokine storms), despite hypercytokinaemia being an edge case/failure mode of the immune system that is not particularly well-understood. The paper I sh…

The paper you cited only deal with cell lines (i.e. in-vitro studies), whereas you can find good quality in-vivo RCT studies about both low grade inflammation and cytokines storm. Hell, you can event find meta-analysis for specific conditions and related inflammatory state (CHF, type 2 diabete, ...) For example : - Heart failure meta analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29348609 - Type 2 diabete meta analysi…

> Hell, we even have preliminary human studies dealing with just that: clinical outcome for patients admitted in intensive care unit, with or without a single mega-dose of vitamin D: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4939707/

Thank you, this is what I was looking for! Great outcome.

The other three papers you cite are also all correlations of Vitamin D with inflammatory factors, not with disease outcomes. I must have missed the study that looks specifically at cytokine storms as a dependent variable. Could you point it out to me?

Re: Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe Covid-19

#302

Post by ccleve » Fri, May 08, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

From a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23086211

There is strong evidence that Vitamin D does nothing. Large scale studies of vitamin D supplements show no benefit.

The article above argues that it is actually sun exposure that brings health benefits, and that vitamin D is just a byproduct. This makes sense. If vitamin D levels are strongly correlated with good health, it doesn't mean that it causes it. There might be some third factor.

Re: Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe Covid-19

#303

Post by hutzlibu » Sat, May 09, 2020, 12:28 AM UTC

Figs wrote: post #242

tlrobinson wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the WHO and FDA never got anything wrong...?

No; rather YouTube has taken it upon themselves to decide what the truth is and censor views they believe are wrong. e.g. see this news article: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2020/04/youtube-ceo-coronav... --- (Snippet from the article) --- YouTube's response is now to simply remove videos containing misinformation while previous policies have seen most related content demonetized. Examples provided by the executi…

"While it may squash some of the stupider and more dangerous ideas floating around right now, it tosses the baby out with the bathwater and harms important discussion about whether those in charge right now do actually have their information right. "

Has been always like this with censorship.

Re: Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe Covid-19

#304

Post by kpfleger » Mon, May 11, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #137

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow. Why isn't this more prominent on the covid radar? How many cases have they seen? N = what value? Also, in terms of number of studies, it's N = 1. I'm not saying it's not a good idea. I'm saying let's get more data before we proclaim it from the roof tops.

I've seen one other paper that mentions this: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202003.0235/v1 There may be others, I haven't really been looking.

I have specifically tried to collect the best papers on this into a detailed report: http://agingbiotech.info/vitamindcovid19/ which has been specifically linked to in this other HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23119949