Yet another vitamin D benefit: lower cancer deaths

Keep taking your daily vitamin D despite lower COVID risks

Many people may have started daily vitamin D supplements because of many articles by me and others that there was solid data showing high enough blood levels were effective against COVID. More people should have their blood tested; you need at least 50 ng/ml for protection.

Now comes new German research showing a positive effect for cancer deaths. This should help ensure that people keep taking vitamin D.

“A meta-analysis conducted at the German Cancer Research Center shows daily vitamin D intake could reduce cancer mortality in the population by 12%. The results from the analysis were published in Ageing Research Reviews.

Vitamin D deficiency is prevalent worldwide and more common in cancer patients during cancer therapy than in the general population.

For the current study, researchers sought to evaluate the effect of vitamin D3 supplementation on cancer mortality in the general population and on prognosis in cancer patients.

The investigative team conducted a systematic literature search that identified 14 studies with a total of nearly 105,000 participants. The researchers considered only studies whose participants had been randomly assigned to the vitamin D3 arm or the placebo arm.

When all 14 studies were pooled, no statistically significant results emerged. The main meta-analysis yielded a reduction in cancer mortality of only 6%.

However, when the studies were divided according to whether vitamin D3 was taken daily in a low dose (400 to 4000 IU per day) or in higher doses administered at longer intervals, (60,000 to 120,000 IU once per month or less) a large difference was seen.

In the four studies with the infrequent higher doses, there was no effect on cancer mortality. In contrast, in the summary of the ten studies with daily dosing, the researchers determined a statistically significant twelve percent reduction in cancer mortality.

"We observed this twelve percent reduction in cancer mortality after untargeted vitamin D3 administration to individuals with and without vitamin D deficiency. We can therefore assume that the effect is significantly higher for those people who are actually vitamin D deficient," said Ben Schöttker, an epidemiologist at the German Cancer Research Center.

The better efficacy outcome with daily doses of vitamin D3 can be explained by the more regular bioavailability of the active agent, the hormone 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, which is only produced by reactions of vitamin D in the body and can presumably inhibit tumor growth, said Schöttker.

Upon further analysis of the studies with daily intake, people aged 70 and older benefited most from vitamin D3 therapy. In addition, the effect was most evident when vitamin D intake was started before the cancer diagnosis.”

Source

Data showing positive effect of vitamin D level on COVID.