[HN Gopher] No evidence Vitamin D affects Covid severity in peop...
___________________________________________________________________
No evidence Vitamin D affects Covid severity in people of European
ancestry
Author : bdz
Score : 17 points
Date : 2021-01-18 19:10 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brunel.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brunel.ac.uk)
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| When I heard the original report on vitamin d deficiency and
| getting seriously ill from COVID, my first thought was people who
| have sedentary lives tend not to be outdoors been active.
|
| I'll add an assumption that this may also follow with another
| correlation that diabetics suffer more from COVID for perhaps the
| same sedentary reasons.
|
| Might be nonsense but correlation doesn't have to mean cause -
| arguing against myself and bad science.
|
| Any opinions from a clinician?
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Studies that show no evidence of a particular phenomenon tend not
| to get the same degree of publicity that studies showing
| something do - but it's great that scientists are making the
| effort to determine if a particular correlation is a result of
| causation. The conclusion of this study is that Europeans (people
| with other ancestry were not covered in the study) with naturally
| high levels of Vitamin D don't suffer less from Covid 19 than
| those without. Regardless, it's still not a bad idea to take
| Vitamin D supplements for other health benefits.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| Too late to edit: I meant to qualify the last sentence that
| Vitamin D supplements are probably more beneficial in winter,
| for people not exposing their skin to sun or those with high
| levels of melanin.
|
| For context, related HN submission on this issue - Lack of
| Vitamin D is associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and
| mortality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25618273
| Jkvngt wrote:
| This is one meta-study, it's not exactly proof.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| There are no proofs in science.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| No, but randomized controlled trials provide much more
| evidence than correlational studies. I'll admit I don't fully
| understand the methods these researchers use, so it's
| possible that they address the common problems, but
| historically conclusions from trying to establish causal
| relationships through data mining have not had a great track
| record. The bits I did understand seem solid enough (vitamin
| D and obesity levels 10-15 years ago, when the participants
| were enrolled, and now _should_ be pretty highly correlated,
| and the sample size is pretty large) but there are a lot of
| non-obvious pitfalls when trying to establish causality with
| purely observational methods.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Here's the paper:
| https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/early/2021/01/07/bm...
|
| Essentially, they appear to have used stratification on genetic
| factors to reduce potential confounders and improve their ability
| to get a less biased estimate.
|
| This seems reasonably solid to me, from a brief overview of the
| methods section (I'm not an expert though, so there may be flaws
| I missed).
|
| Definitely some countervailing evidence against Vit-D being
| _directly_ related. There 's almost certainly some third factor
| between Vit-D and health, but we don't yet have a good sense for
| what that might be.
|
| Note that the study is only analysing data for White British
| individuals, so if you are of a different ethnicity there may
| still be hope for you ;)
| tomjen3 wrote:
| >There's almost certainly some third factor between Vit-D and
| health
|
| A healthy balanced diet and (outdoor) life/exercise?
|
| Regardless it seems that a lack of vitamin D is bad for you, so
| even if it doesn't directly help with Covid taking suplements
| seems a nobrainer to me.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, that's my prior.
|
| Rather difficult to measure and put into an RCT though,
| unfortunately.
| aeternum wrote:
| Seems flawed to me. When the individuals with genetic factors
| that make them Vit-D deficient go to the doctor, they will
| almost certainly be told to take Vit-D supplements at a higher
| rate than those without the genetic factor. This confounds the
| results and makes this type of study useless as it does not
| measure actual vitamin-D levels.
| karpour wrote:
| There really needs to be a proper big trial conducted on this.
| There's too much evidence pointing to a possible link between
| Vitamin D supplements and better Covid outcomes for people with
| Vitamin D deficiency to dismiss it based on one meta-study.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-18 23:03 UTC)