EDIT: The study was also performed exclusively on patients who presented with acute coronary syndrome. Average age was over 60, nearly 80% were men, and half had already had at least one heart attack. Keep that context in mind when reading numbers about the patients in the study. This is a heavily biased sample, which is fine for the purposes of the study but important to remember.
> Participants in the experiment arm who stayed within 40-80 ng/mL of vitamin D had a 52% lower risk of a repeat heart attack.
The study did use supplements to get people into that range if necessary, but the important thing is to keep your Vitamin D in that range, not specifically to just take supplements.
There’s a lot of claims online that everyone’s Vitamin D is too low and we should all be taking very high dose supplements, but it’s getting exaggerated. My doctor said she’s seeing a huge number of patients coming back with excessively high Vitamin D levels after taking supplement doses recommended by influencers. It happened to me, too, with what I though was a conservative dose of Vitamin D (5K IU, not even taken every day)
So you really have to check. Even though I work indoors and wear sunscreen a lot, apparently my diet and limited sun exposure alone are sufficient for staying in this range. Others will have different results. Don’t guess!
Also remember that Vitamin D levels change slowly. Supplementation can build up and accumulate in the body over time if you’re taking too much. You want to stabilize on a dose and then check in 3-6 months. Some people get a low Vitamin D result and start taking high doses every day, then a year or two later they’re into hypervitaminosis D and have no way to clear it other than waiting for it to be processed out.
In 2020 I test results for vitamin D was ridiculous low. I have been taking supplements
Jan 02, 2020 4:32 pm 25-Hydroxy Vitamin D Total 9 ng/mL 30-100 ng/mL
I took me five years just to get to something close to the lowest end of normal.
I was started on supplements in the in 2k IU and after poor progress boosted to 5k IU everyday to get to this level.
I have been spending the past year on a sailboat instead of server room and look forward to seeing my test results.
For example, 50% of surfers were found to have insufficient vitamin D in one study. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17426097/
There are at least two possible conclusions that you could draw. One conclusion is that we all need vitamin D supplementation regardless of how much sun exposure we receive.
Another conclusion is that we might want to reevaluate what we consider the normal range to be, especially when we are deciding a range for a specific individual.
> I took me five years just to get to something close to the lowest end of normal.
Five years of supplementing to get up to 30ng/mL? Something is wrong. Could your supplements have not actually contained any real amount of Vitamin D? Certain malabsorption disorders also reduce Vitamin D absorption, for example.
It's a low enough dose that if I had to choose between taking it blindly or not taking it at all if I was so depressed I couldn't get out of bed to get my levels tested, then I would do it blindly for a month or two without second thoughts.
IMO that’s part of what’s interesting about this study design — they tested vitamin D blood levels and adjusted the supplement dose based on that. This seems like a much better approach than taking a high dose blindly.
I think the headline is accurate. The 52% number is from the experiment arm (participants who received a vitamin D supplement, with the quantity guided by blood testing). While it’s technically possible for the supplement dosage to be calculated as zero, 85% of participants were deficient at baseline, so this isn’t the main effect.
Yes, but it's also important to note that the study wasn't on a representative sample of the general population. They recruited people who had acute coronary syndrome. The average age was over 60 years old, 80% were men, and half of them had already had at least one heart attack.
I've been working in heart health in 10 years and I was surprised at the magnitude of the effect here.
I hope it holds up as they move toward the final publication. Vitamin D supplementation is cheap and this could have a huge benefit.
Every single one of them included Vitamin D testing in the annual checkup.
Two of my jobs in the past few years have had wellness programs that offered free Vitamin D testing along with a couple other things (A1c, lipids)
It’s very common in the United States at least. I know this goes against the “US healthcare bad” narrative but one of the difficulties with our costs is that we get more testing and procedures. Cutting those costs is going to be hard because people like the freedom to have their doctor order common tests
When the topic came up recently at a get together everyone could recall their relative Vitamin D levels (too low, normal) from recent checkups.
It’s common, at least in the US areas where I’ve lived.
It wasn't too long ago that evidence was mixed on benefits in this area: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602...
Nice find!
Well, that is strange though. Because if you have such an effect, should you not include this? If macrophages are less active, perhaps infection rates go up, which can contribute to death. Perhaps not to the amount of the 52% gains mentioned here, but the website does not mention this at all whatsoever; the word "macrophages" occurs only twice on total.
There are two main caveats to the TARGET-D study. First, this was presented at the American Heart Association scientific sessions, but the full manuscript isn’t out yet. It’s possible the results will end up not being statistically significant, having a methodological flaw, and so on. In the presented results, the reduction in heart attack risk was statistically significant but the change in overall death and stroke risk had a p value > 0.05. Second, while Vitamin D seems to be an effective intervention to reduce heart attack risk, we don’t yet know whether Vitamin D is an independent marker of heart disease risk or whether it’s reflecting known mechanisms such as inflammation and calcification.Aww that's bad.
I remember years ago they claimed that a bacterium was using arsenic instead of phosphorus - turns out the data they produced was all made up:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258
This was here in this article most likely not the case, I assume, but still it is bad to talk about the data without having published the article already.
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/heart-attack-risk-halved-in-...
https://www.hcplive.com/view/target-d-optimized-vitamin-d-do...
The study was presented at the AHA scientific sessions; full manuscript isn't out yet. It's in the caveats section in the article.
I would like to bring my D levels up, but not at the expense of kidney stones.
It's just easier to overdose by mistake this way.