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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

#351
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a scientific classification system for evaluating how light vs. dark a person's skin is? I'd like to know how much my relatively darker skin is preventing vit D uptake / creation in the body

There is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale which I learned about from the apple health app, no idea how widespread it is or how useful it is as a model.

Thank you

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually have an expert on this comment here quite often, too high Vit D dose can cause problems with calcium: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=devaboone And she's done a series on it: https://www.devaboone.com/post/vitamin-d-part-1-back-to-basi...

> too high Vit D dose can cause problems Many over-the-counter vitamin D supplements appear dosed for people with problems absorbing the chemical.

High doses can be appropriate as a one off dose for someone with low dosage

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

#353
This test really doesn't hold a lot of useful data. It doesn't calculate any of the statistics of those that died which is kinda of important when age and previous health conditions are important. It doesn't gather BMI, physical activity levels, ethnicity, secondary/multiple infections, cause of death, type 1 or 2 diabetes, etc. Medical trials are hard because of all the variables. I think it actually works against this trial having it randomized especially when there is no placebo group.

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

#355
post #282

Previously on HN, a physician shared some thoughts on treating Vitamin D as a medication and not as a dietary supplement: Part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24138590 Part 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261948 To summarize - popping in large doses of Vitamin D is not exactly safe.

Deva is deep into writing part 3 at the moment (the physicians husband here) where she reviews these trials, what they mean and how they should be interpreted. I think she will be finished soon.

Thanks for the update, would love her opinion on this paper's outcome.

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

#356
post #347
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neolithic hunter gatherers were as strong as elite athletes today. Civilization and automation have made us weak and frail. https://www.popsci.com/prehistoric-women-strong-rower/

Lacking in raw physical power by comparison, sure. But what health issues do we avoid? Do new health issues arise? Optimality in a complex environment is inevitably a nontrivial trade off; we aren't forced to hunt animals with primitive weapons or contend with widespread famine in the modern world.

> But what health issues do we avoid?

Infant and child mortality is much much lower.

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

#357
Very small scale but sounds promising. I've been taking 2000UI/day for few years now since my doc found my vitamin D was pretty low, it's now far up in the normal range now. I didn't let him give me the massive doses that they want to give you for low vitamin D, and opted for just starting to take the supplement, when I went back in 3 months later everything was in the normal range. I don't actually get much sunlight as a den dwelling programmer so it's the next best thing.

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely not true. Elevated blood calcium and creatinine levels are definitely possible if you take too much, and people are sensitive at different rates.

I tried taking some Vitamin D alone, and I rapidly got a very uncomfortable sensitivity in my teeth. I thought maybe this has something to do with what it does to calcium. So I tried a combination calcium + Vitamin D capsule, and it didn't seem to have the same effect. Maybe the second one is safe, but I'm wondering what was going on and if there are potential drawbacks to either one.

That's weird I've been taking vitamin D (2000iu) per day and haven't had anything like that. I do get lots of calcium though via cheese and dairy products (I'm one of the few people I know that will actually drink a glass of milk fearlessly)

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

#359
post #112
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, all patients received these supplemental drugs, as at the time they were considered the best standard of care. (Also to be clear: they're not anti-virals.) Of the 75 patients in the trial, 50 people received additionally Vitamin D3 supplementation (in the form of calcifediol), and 25 did not. Notably, though, diabetes and high blood pressure were substantially more frequent in the control group, which ar…

> Notably, though, diabetes and high blood pressure were substantially more frequent in the control group How did this happen? Just bad luck with randomization?

ack those could definitely affect this, isn't that why they normally try to select otherwise healthy patients as a baseline? Bring in the unhealthy people for the big studies and they'll most likely be spread much more evenly

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

#360
post #345
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a substantial oversimplification. Hydroxychloroquine looked promising for a while, and was being studied in an RCT, but that RCT was ended before completion because of the release of an observational study that suggested strongly negative outcomes from Hydroxychloroquine. Later, that observational study was retracted because it was discovered to be based on falsified data. So, unfortunately, we don't know ver…

> but we do know that it has become a massive political hot potato I posted this a few days ago and got an interesting swing of votes on that comment since then: > So, unfortunately, we don't know very much about Hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness and risks in use For effectiveness it looks like we actually do, thanks to an experiment Switzerland accidentally ran on their population over May and June [0]. On May 27,…

That is quite a spike! Unfortunately the sharpness of the edge makes it pretty likely that a change in therapy is the cause -- time to death from hospital admission has a median of 10-12 days, but this is not a "wall", it's a median. The actual distribution is probably somewhat normal -- you'd expect a gradual increase and decrease around the intervention. We don't know how or when the Hydroxychloroquine was administered, but the mechanism of action seems to be prevention of infection early in the course of infection, generally before hospitalization.

To me, this seems more likely coincidental or a reporting change.

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