Vitamin D Could Help Cancer Patients Live Longer | MSUToday

Michigan State University doctors have found that vitamin D, if taken for at least three years, could help cancer patients live longer.

The results suggest that the vitamin has important benefits other than just contributing to bone health and were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology on June 3, 2019.

In the United States, cancer is the second leading cause of death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Vitamin D has had a significant effect on reducing the risk of death in people with cancer, but unfortunately, it has not shown any evidence of its ability to prevent cancer," said Tarek Haykal, author Lead of the study and resident physician resident physician from Michigan State University and Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan.

The researchers looked at disease prevention data from more than 79,000 patients in several studies randomly comparing the use of vitamin D to a placebo over a period of at least three years. Haykal and his team focused on any information regarding cancer incidence and mortality.

"The difference in mortality rates between the vitamin D and placebo groups was statistically significant enough to show how important it could be for the cancer population," Haykal said.

Although these results look promising, Haykal warned that the exact amount of vitamin to take and the levels needed in the blood were still unknown. He also added that it was unclear to what extent vitamin D prolonged the shelf life and why it had this result.

"There are still a lot of questions and more research is needed," Haykal said. "All we can say is that it takes at least three years of supplement taking to see any effect."

The results show, however, that Haykal would like to see more doctors, especially oncologists, prescribing vitamin D to patients in general.

"We know it has benefits with minimal side effects," he said. "There is a lot of potential here."

Varun Samji, Yazan Zayed, Inderdeep Gakhal, Vijaysai Veerapaneni, Michele Obeid, Babikir Kheiri and Sunil Badami, also participated in the study. Ghassan Bachuwa, director of the Hurley Internal Medicine Residency Program, and Rizwan Danish, an oncologist at the Genesee Cancer Treatment and Blood Disease Center, also contributed to this research.

(Note to media: Please include a link to the original article in the online coverage: https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2019.37.15_suppl.1534)