Effect of Vitamin D3 supplementation in patients with severe Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

Effect of Vitamin D3 supplementation in patients with severe Covid-19

medrxiv.org

29 pointsHerodotus3819 comments

I have seen a lot of posts on vitamin D and Covid here. In this study, which was a multicenter, randomized, double blind placebo controlled study in Brazil, the researchers found no benefit in treating hospitalized patients with severe COVID with vitamin D3.

This study is helpful because it gives us evidence that if vitamin D deficiency is associated with severe disease, treating it at the time of hospitalization is not helpful and we can focus on other treatment options.

Note that this is a preprint which means it has been made available before final peer review.

Yes. Most of the research I've seen (and I didn't go out of my way to do a proper review) seemed to indicate that the thinking was that Vitamin D was a prophylactic rather than a treatment. Or, perhaps more accurately, Vitamin D deficiency might be a risk factor for clinical infection.

I'd be interested, as fraught as studies invoking race are at the moment, in statistics around clinically significant COVID infection categorized by ancestral regions, as Vitamin D deficiency in polar and temperate zones are so strongly correlated with skin colour.

Vitamin D deficiency is a marker for one of several health conditions leaving people vulnerable to Covid. There is no reason to believe that this would work as a general treatment.

I agree. There is ongoing research into whether the correlation of low vit D is just the association with other comorbidities or whether there may be an independent risk to low levels.

I expect additional studies to result in the coming months that will show more evidence on supplementation before patients are sick enough to be hospitalized. My gut feeling is that it won't make a difference, but until we have the data I can't know for sure. This study, however, makes me feel more confident that I am not hurting a patient by withholding vit D supplementation if htey are admitted with severe Covid.

I've had extremely low D3 levels in the past. I'd like to point out that, even at high doses, getting your levels back to normal can take weeks.

Vitamin D deficiency varies widely by region because of sun exposure; Brazil is on the equator. Wonder if that skewed things.

Nitpick that doesn't invalidate your question: though the equator line does cross through Brazil, most of the population doesn't live anywhere close to the equator.

Also, Brazil is 4000 kilometers long from north to south.

"Close" is relative. Most of the population of Brazil lives within the tropics, and the furthest point from the equator in Brazil is closer than the southernmost points in the US or Europe, where much of the relevant studies were conducted.

What are your thoughts on this?

"Does supplemental Vitamin D help prevent Covid-19?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq8_mFotS64

This study was only for patients current with COVID, but the science suggests high levels of Vitamin D is a key indicator for avoiding COVID. Prevention it seems is worth the Vitamin D. One study, published online in JAMA Network Open in September, used data from 489 patients in Chicago. It showed the risk of testing positive for the disease was 1.77 times higher for people with a deficiency compared with those with adequate levels of vitamin D.

[0].https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

That all to say, I think the differing view points on Vitamin D might have something to do with general views on supplementation as either helpful, harmful, or pointless.

This seems like it is for people who already have it. If you are not yet infected, there is evidence that Vitamin D can help reduce the severity of covid if you get it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77093-z?fbclid=Iw...

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3642/htm?fbclid=IwAR3Y8...

Please don't editorialize titles with misleading conclusions. The reword implies that D3 blood levels have no effect.

Actual title: "Effect of Vitamin D3 Supplementation vs Placebo on Hospital Length of Stay in Patients with Severe COVID-19: A Multicenter, Double-blind, Randomized Controlled Trial"

That title was too long to submit, so I tried to shorten it in a way that seemed fair to me.

The study found no effect on their measured clinical outcomes after vitamin D level supplementation.

It’s like you are going out of your way to prevent people from taking a harmless supplement which may actually save their life or at worst (what is even the worst?). I’m baffled by the motivations.

If ever there was a low risk supplement to at least consider, getting your vitamin D in check is probably the lowest hanging fruit we have ever seen.

The motivation is to know the truth and to focus on interventions that can help. Note this study gives us no information on whether taking vit D before you become sick helps or not, it cannot answer that. I think there is very low risk of taking a Vit D supplement.

What it does do is give doctors more confidence that making patients take another pill when they are already sick in the hospital won't do anything to help them. This saves unnecessary costs, possible side effects (albeit high dose Vit D is still relatively harmless), and patient comfort (when you are as short of breath as some severe covid patients even taking pills and eating can be a challenge).

There are many supplements that people very strongly believe help covid without good evidence beside vitamin D, why shouldn't we take all of them all the time? There are people and doctors who are passionate about the potential benefits in covid for: ivermectin, Vit C, Vit D, Zinc, famotidine (AKA Zantac) and hydroxychloroquine.

At some point we have to actually look at the data.

The affect of the title seems to encourage dropping your daily dose of vitamin d, even though as you say it doesn’t conclude that is the best advice. Maybe my criticism is subtle but it seems important.

The title states no result or conclusion. The actual conclusion might discourage people who decided to supplement that it has no effect (and indeed it may not), but it doesnt comment on that either, merely stating: "Vitamin D3 supplementation does not confer therapeutic benefits among hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19" (emphasis mine).

There's risk of folks foregoing other precautions because they believe they can mitigate the effects of COVID with other treatments.

https://c19vitamind.com/

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