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Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

sciencedirect.com

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Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#41

Post by getpost »

This is hardly worth writing up for n=57. I scanned the full text and didn't see any notation regarding vitamin d blood levels in patients, which would have been useful to know. Maybe nobody wanted to pay for those tests? A helpful result would be something like, "blood levels of X ng/ml improved survival rates Y% with a confidence interval of Z."

Instead, we have an odd and vague dosage, "80,000 IU vitamin D3 every 2–3 months." I gather this study was constructed given the supplement regimen that was in-place. Why were the patients being supplemented that way? What standard of care is that?

Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#42

Post by sradman »

> All residents in the nursing-home receive chronic vitamin D supplementation with regular maintenance boluses (single oral dose of 80,000 IU vitamin D3 every 2–3 months), without systematically performing serum control test as recommended in French nursing-homes due to the very high prevalence of hypovitaminosis D reaching 90–100 % in this population. Here, the "Intervention group" was defined as all COVID-19 residents who received an oral bolus of 80,000 IU vitamin D3 either in the week following the suspicion or diagnosis of COVID-19, or during the previous month. The "Comparator group" corresponded to all other COVID-19 residents who did not receive any recent vitamin D supplementation. None received D2 or intramuscular supplements. All medications were dispended and supervised by a nurse.

All of these vitamin D studies seem to expose a single truth; serum vitamin D tests are too expensive. I suspect that these papers with inferred rather than measured vitamin D levels will continue until an easy and low cost vitamin D test is developed.

Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#43

Post by raverbashing »

scott_s wrote: post #38

The current discussion here seems to be about Vitamin D in general, and ignoring the study itself. In my reading, this study is weak evidence. This was not a randomized, controlled trial, but historical analyses of a natural experiment. In itself, that's not a problem: we can learn a lot from natural experiments. But I don't think this instance is much of an "experiment." As I understand it, all of the residents (96…

> as far as I can tell - do not explain why these people did not receive their normal Vitamin D supplementation.

My understanding: each patient receives a bolus dose every 2 to 3 months. The intervention group had that date within 1 mo before diagnosis (or 1wk after)

> Here, the "Intervention group" was defined as all COVID-19 residents who received an oral bolus of 80,000 IU vitamin D3 either in the week following the suspicion or diagnosis of COVID-19, or during the previous month

Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#44

Post by Aldipower »

woj-tek wrote: post #30

Friendly reminder: vitamin D3 can affect sleep if taken later in a day. I tend to skip if I forget to take it before noon. Also, D3 without additional K2 may lead to calcium excess.

Oh no, 8 hours to late, but thanx for the reminder. ;)

Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#45

Post by chartpath »

Everyone on HN always says they are taking like 10x the RDA and it's the only thing that makes them survive the winter, blah blah blah. Intentionally hyperbolic, but not far off.

Every time I try just 400 IU per day for a week it makes me dizzy and woozy. I eat plenty of meat and veggies with K2, and nuts and fish with magnesium. Vitamin-D containing foods like milk, eggs and fish are totally fine. I can bake all day in the sun and don't burn easily.

There's something different about synthetic D3, and I wish I could get all the benefits that people here claim.

Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#46

Post by hosh »

chartpath wrote: post #45

Everyone on HN always says they are taking like 10x the RDA and it's the only thing that makes them survive the winter, blah blah blah. Intentionally hyperbolic, but not far off. Every time I try just 400 IU per day for a week it makes me dizzy and woozy. I eat plenty of meat and veggies with K2, and nuts and fish with magnesium. Vitamin-D containing foods like milk, eggs and fish are totally fine. I can bake all day…

Paul Stemets, a mycologists, had worked out a way to get button or shitake mushrooms to generate a lot of vitamin D. You simply expose them to sunlight for about a "day" (and no more). (Unfortunately, I wish there were more detailed study on this; how many hours of sunlight are we talking about? Is it latitude dependent?)

My point is that there are ways to generate supplemental vitamin-d without having to go get synthetic supplements.

Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#47

Post by Jabbles »

The important factors for Vitamin D are that it's cheap to manufacture and has well known (low) risks. We have reasons to believe that it might help fight Covid, especially in deficient individuals, even if we do not have controlled studies.

Making it freely available and recommended for anyone who doesn't obviously get enough already is a reasonable strategy. It might not work - the correlation may not be causal. But it might be worth it anyway, because the downsides are minimal.

You could make roughly the same argument for wearing masks.

Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#49

Post by aphextron »

emerged wrote: post #34
aphextron wrote: post #18

What is it with the obsession over vitamin D on HN?

I believe it's related to its potential to save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.

>I believe it's related to its potential to save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.

Not just specifically with COVID-19. In general, there's at least a few front page stories a month.

Google seems to confirm this: https://www.google.com/search?biw=1660&bih=865&tbs=qdr%3Ay&e...

Re: Vitamin D improves survival in Covid-19 elderly patients

#50

Post by rossdavidh »

scott_s wrote: post #38

The current discussion here seems to be about Vitamin D in general, and ignoring the study itself. In my reading, this study is weak evidence. This was not a randomized, controlled trial, but historical analyses of a natural experiment. In itself, that's not a problem: we can learn a lot from natural experiments. But I don't think this instance is much of an "experiment." As I understand it, all of the residents (96…

Ditto all that, plus the mortality rate in the (very small) comparison group was 44%, which is very high even for the elderly. The mortality rate for the vit D group was not really all that great.

On the flip side, given that they comparison group were receiving vit D3 occasionally, just not lately, it is possible that this underestimates the impact of vit D3 on a group that had long-term insufficient vit D3.

Nothing here to say that vit D isn't good for you, especially if you have a deficiency (such as from insufficient time in the sun), but not a stunning piece of info either.

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