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Doctors can’t seem to decide on vitamin D.
At the height of the global coronavirus epidemic, doctors began noting a correlation between vitamin D deficiency and the severity of COVID-19 disease, with a study finding that 80% of patients who ultimately succumbed to disease were often also poor in nutrients, which we get mainly from sunlight.
However, these reports have been challenged by researchers who remain conservative about supplementation, calling for more research before consumers are encouraged to add vitamin D capsules to their diets.
Vitamin D deficiency has long been on the rise, as humans spend less time working and being outdoors, and more time working in offices and online – and this is truer now than ever during the pandemic.
But a new report from Spanish researchers at Hospital del Mar in Barcelona has added evidence to the pro-D camp, specifically D3 or calcifediol, as a treatment for coronavirus patients. Their study of 930 patients with COVID-19 found that those who received the supplement, rather than a placebo, saw “mortality reduced by more than 60%,” the study authors wrote. These patients were also 80% less likely to require intensive care in hospital.
Only 36 of the 551 patients who took calcifediol died from the coronavirus. Meanwhile, the control group of 379 patients lost 57 to the disease. In addition, only 5% of the cohort taking D3 were admitted to the ICU.
“This confirms the conclusion of an earlier pilot test in Cordoba [Spain] in which calcifediol treatment leads to a more than 50% reduction in ICU admissions among COVID-19 hospital patients, ”according to the full report.
The results were shared by the Social Science Research Network as pre-published material, awaiting peer review of medical research. That hasn’t stopped some political leaders from welcoming the untested findings, such as UK lawmaker David Davis, who called UK health officials to take the study results into account.
“His conclusions are incredibly clear”, MP Davis said Sunday, in a tweet appreciated by 25,000 users on Twitter. “An 80% reduction in the need for intensive care and a 60% reduction in deaths, just by giving very cheap and very safe therapy.”
However, Yale researcher F. Perry Wilson called the new report “super sus” in a series of tweets fired Sunday.
“Folks, we need to talk about this Vitamin D essay. I have no interest in this game – take some Vitamin D if you want, but this preprint is great,” he wrote.
“If that’s true, it would be one of the (if not THE most) effective treatments for COVID. But there are problems. . . Wilson suggested, noting that the type of “randomized” trial performed by doctors at Hospital del Mar was incompatible with the statistical model used to produce the results.
“These are super basic things – you don’t call your study a randomized trial when it’s a cluster randomized trial,” he added. “And the peer reviewers would have asked them 100% to go back and do the statistics again.”
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