OT: Well, that was easy money- Vitamin D vs Covid-19

I'll pass.

I've a suggestion for the future: condense your thoughts into a few short sentences - most of us are simply too busy with work, family, life, etc. to read posts about studies, that the poster wants us to believe are rigged, from someone who isn't a medical professional, and has no professional expertise on the subject.

Thanks.

Buddy Blank said...
I'll pass.

I've a suggestion for the future: condense your thoughts into a few short sentences - most of us are simply too busy with work, family, life, etc. to read posts about studies, that the poster wants us to believe are rigged, from someone who isn't a medical professional, and has no professional expertise on the subject.

Thanks.

Buddy, I recommend you put me on ignore. Especially since you are so busy. Because I submit that the things you say about me in that comment show that you will still have no interest- except to fight against- anything I post even if I get it down to 3 words. That would also save me the trouble of honestly trying to answer some question of yours supposedly seeking greater understanding, when it is in fact simply a trap leading to some sort of ad hominem attack from you. I sometimes think that your main purpose is to get some conflict started which will lead to a thread being closed. I hope I am wrong about that. Regardless, considering the things you think about me, it would only make sense for you to ignore my posts whether 2 words or 100, especially if they are not directly meant for you. In the meantime, feel free to continue taking your 4000 IU/day of vitamin D, even if a no nothing like me continues to post studies that seem to support you doing so.

Let me make a suggestion. Buddy, just Don’t read or respond to Billy bobs posts if you think they are too long. Same goes for anyone else that feels that way. If his posts annoy you to the point where you just have to say something, then put him on ignore.
billy bob, just ignore Buddy if you don’t like his comments,. if his comments bother you to the point where you just have to respond, then put him on ignore,

The comments so far have been reasonably civil, but the last few have the potential to lead to trouble,
Like Mattam said, the world is f’d up enough, nobody needs conflict on a support forum.

Here BB a new study
Among 26 patients not treated with calcifediol, thirteen required ICU admission (50%), while out of fifty patients treated with calcifediol only one required admission to the ICU, whereas the other patients remained in conventional hospitalization

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076020302764?via%3Dihub&utm_campaign=Chris%20Kresser%20General%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=94616504&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8amcEOhEEV0CKpylgn1GBs3KXJBQCyCWKiQFYobeE***iwjLrjKQ_xhQ-JoFPr1q0AqivicldBLFNg4XXtvEe9-Rhi-W_6ATfhgWNMeu0arFNq4NU&utm_content=94616504&utm_source=hs_email

NotBubba said...
Here BB a new study
Among 26 patients not treated with calcifediol, thirteen required ICU admission (50%), while out of fifty patients treated with calcifediol only one required admission to the ICU, whereas the other patients remained in conventional hospitalization

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076020302764?via%3Dihub&utm_campaign=Chris%20Kresser%20General%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=94616504&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8amcEOhEEV0CKpylgn1GBs3KXJBQCyCWKiQFYobeE***iwjLrjKQ_xhQ-JoFPr1q0AqivicldBLFNg4XXtvEe9-Rhi-W_6ATfhgWNMeu0arFNq4NU&utm_content=94616504&utm_source=hs_email

So, that study is out of hard hit Spain, eh?

" Highlights

•

The vitamin D endocrine system may have a variety of actions on cells and tissues involved in COVID-19 progression.
•

Administration of calcifediol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D to hospitalized COVID-19 patients significantly reduced their need for Intensive Care United admission.
•

Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease.
....
Multivariate Risk Estimate Odds Ratio for ICU in patients with Calcifediol treatment vs Without Calcifediol treatment ICU (adjusting by Hypertension and T2DM): 0.03 (95%CI: 0.003-0.25). Of the patients treated with calcifediol, none died, and all were discharged, without complications. ( I will add: !!!!!!!!!!!!! ) The 13 patients not treated with calcifediol, who were not admitted to the ICU, were discharged. Of the 13 patients admitted to the ICU, two died and the remaining 11 were discharged.
Conclusion

Our pilot study demonstrated that administration of a high dose of Calcifediol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D, a main metabolite of vitamin D endocrine system, significantly reduced the need for ICU treatment of patients requiring hospitalization due to proven COVID-19 . Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease, but larger trials with groups properly matched will be required to show a definitive answer."..................................................................................................................................

But NotBubba, this can not be a real study, can it? 25 to 1 in favor of the D or some variation of it, regarding a need for ICU, and an even greater difference regarding mortality? Because if true, what will that mean regarding needless deaths here in the USA, where most authorities have consistently refused to consider looking at vitamin D status of people before they get sick, or at least correcting it once they do get sick? Not to mention the many other possibilities that might help even more, either alone or in addition to vitamin D, like vitamin C before getting sick, IV C after getting sick , zinc + Quercetin which probably acts about like zinc + hydroxychloroquine/HCQ( or who knows, maybe even better? ). If these recent studies are true and not fraudulent, wouldn't that mean the multiple thousands would have died needlessly, due to a refusal to even consider such cheap, readily available and relatively harmless approaches? So, I think there is an incentive to never really consider such among main stream medicine. Whatever your reasons for refusing to recommend such approaches before hand, you sure would not want it to become known about any 25 to 1 considering what that means has resulted.

My good high school friend just died of Covid-19 over in GA. I have not seen him in a few years, but he was a wonderful human being. And I am just simmering inside because I feel in my gut that if I could get hold of his medical records, I would find out that no one even considered checking is D status, or zinc, or giving him some IV vitamin C with or without methyprednisolone, or of course HCQ + zinc early on(or instead Quercetin+ Zinc). Probably not a one was considered. And there was probably no one(not even his doctors) to warn him before hand to look into these matters himself. I communicate with a lot of my HS friends on FB and by e-mail, and they are all thoroughly warned and informed, and they can listen or not(most do, I think). But Brewster was not in the internet world. And, it seems unlikely his doctors would have warned him. But, he was probably well informed about social distancing and mask wearing, but, if so, that did not help him. Frankly, the system just infuriates me.

Post Edited (BillyBob@388) : 9/4/2020 7:07:56 PM (GMT-6)

I forgot to say about the previous post/study: one thing that I like about this sort of study, even though it is not a randomized control trial, unlike the study discussed just before this one: they measured vitamin D in these subjects several years before any of them got pneumonia. Why do I like that, or find that useful? Sometimes people argue: Well, without a placebo controlled intervention, how can you know if the low vitamin D is contributing to the disease, rather than the disease causing the low vitamin D?

Well, here is the thing: these people, like most people who do not supplement, were low on D BEFORE they ever got sick, because the measurements were made before they ever got sick. Thus, it would be impossible for the disease process to be causing the low vitamin D, since they already had it before they got sick.

However, is definitely not impossible that the low D contributed to the appearance of the disease, and not impossible that the higher levels of D contributed to the better outcome of the people who most likely supplemented, which is about the only way that most people end up with a high D reading.

So, while an RCT is best, this sort of study is pretty darn useful. And pretty darn consistent. Has any one ever seen a study where the group that had the least D in their blood- and which was also at a level considered by many authorities to be insufficient or deficient- did better with whatever disease is being looked at? Other than possibly when looking for kidney stones, and even then slight differences? Usually not even in that case, depending on dose and other supplements taken with the D.

One other advantage to this approach. If you simply measure D levels( or whatever levels) during some time period before they get sick, as part of over all lab testing, and some time later once some one is sick you look back to see what lab levels might have been, then placebo effect would be impossible. There is no pill being given that could cause a placebo effect. No one knows they are being studied with some substance that the doctors think might help them, so there is no way for their minds to produce a benefit from the substance that is simply caused by by placebo effect, or for the researches to introduce some bias without realizing they are doing so. It simply is what it is. They became sick, and some time back before they became sick, their D blood level(or whatever they are looking at) was high, medium or low.

In this case, they measured D in " 1,421 subjects living in the Kuopio region in Eastern Finland ", and then some time later, observed how many got pneumonia, and compared that to the previous known D levels.

"The results showed that during the follow-up, subjects with serum vitamin D3 levels representing the lowest third were more than 2.5 times more likely to contract pneumonia than subjects with high vitamin D3 levels.....................Earlier research has shown that vitamin D deficiency weakens the immune defence system and increases the risk of mild respiratory infections. This University of Eastern Finland study was the first one to establish that vitamin D deficiency also increases the risk of contracting pneumonia in the ageing general population. According to the researchers, this finding supports earlier observations on the diverse role of vitamin D in the body, and it also calls for further research on vitamin D deficiency as a public health issue. In northern latitudes, there is enough sun exposure to maintain sufficient vitamin D levels in summer, but not during the winter season, and vitamin D supplementation is often required.............".

Post Edited (BillyBob@388) : 9/6/2020 6:41:21 PM (GMT-6)

Pratoman said...
Billy bob, a friend sent this to me tonight, he is a retired pharmacist. Thought I’d share....

https://bestlifeonline.com/vitamin-d-deficiency-covid-risk/

“having a vitamin D deficiency increases your risk of contracting COVID—in fact, it makes you nearly 80 percent more likely to test positive for the virus.”

As I’ve mentioned, I was deficient in D, started 5000 IU’s a day, a few years ago, and vut D levels have normalized.

Thank you, Ken. Just one more arrow for the quiver. I'm going to need a bigger quiver. I'm not sure how many it will take before most folks finally think it is worth the minimal risk and expense, worth the gamble. And how many will it take before most doctors will mention it for their patients?

"The new study also comes on the heels of other recently released research on the effects of vitamin D in the body's fight against someone already infected with COVID. The results of that study, published in The Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, found that patients treated with a high dose of vitamin D were significantly less likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit or to be intubated."

Post Edited (BillyBob@388) : 9/6/2020 9:11:43 PM (GMT-6)

Buddy, thanks for the additional references, but I think you miss my point, maybe I worded it poorly. Most assuredly, the studies are being done and the evidence is piling up. That is in fact the very purpose of this thread, to document all the new studies relative to vitamin D vs Covid-19, and the evidence is getting to the point of overwhelming. " (This isn't the first time major medical journals have published studies on vitamin D, and its relationship to Covid.)". I KNOW! That's what this entire thread is about.

Thus, when I say "no matter how strongly I feel about vitamin D status and or IV vitamin C, zinc, etc, it is apparent this information is never going to be made known to the public by our government and most medical professionals", I obviously do not mean that some researchers, some where, are not going to do the research. Some, like one or two examples I provided recently, are even going to do extremely biased and thus useless studies that at first glance seem to prove D useless against viruses or bacterial infections. But plenty, both Ph.D.s and MDs have done good research, and released the results to the public, at least to those who know how to find it.

But, Buddy, I think most are not like us here at HWPC, most have no clue how to find it and how to decide if a study is extremely biased or not. Thus, have you ever heard of one of these studies from NBC nightly news? Of course not. How about Dr, Fauci and Dr. Birx, have you ever heard them mention Vitamin D ( or IV C ) or a single one of these studies at one of their news conferences, or anywhere else? No? Me either. I have heard them say such as this: " There is no evidence that there is anything you can do other than masks and social distancing". The studies indicate that is not at all true, including the new link you just provided me. But not only are they not telling us about things that might help and are very unlikely to harm, they are actually saying we can't do a darn ting until they make us a vaccine or come up with some other drug in the future. Right? Isn't that what they say? And they represent both the pinnacle of the medical world and our Federal Gov. And they are apparently never going to tell us.

No Buddy, if you find out something like in the link you provided ( but that link does not work for me , it says "bad link"), we are going to have to do the research on the research ourselves.

So how about our doctors, who are at least as skilled(one would hope) at keeping up with the research as any of us? Do they inform us what the studies say we should be doing? Well, some do, and still plenty don't. Until Covid shut us down, I taught a Sunday School class of mostly WW2 vets for over 10 years. They often had complaints about the side effects of some new drug their doc had them on. Most common was some new blood pressure drug they had started taking and a few days later they started just falling over backwards while just standing there. But more than once over the tears, during the "how are we all doing" discussions, I had asked the group how many of their doctors advised them to make sure their blood D levels were at least adequate. Not a single one ever raised their hands. If any of them ever actually supplemented, it was only because of the info that I gave to them, not their doctors.

I recently gave the example of showing my URO the most recent study on D vs CV-19, and asked him if he took D. He said heck yes, 5k per day, because he has a family history of PCa. But did he ever tell me about this? Of course not, few do, it would seem.

Here is a good one for you: I post about every study to my FB page, hoping to alert many folks who have no clue. Recently, a retired MD anesthesiologist I worked with for decades contacted me on FB, wanting to know how much D and or C and or Zinc, because his grandson had just come down with Covid. He had no clue.

So Buddy, the point I wanted(but failed) to make was NOT that doctors are not doing the research and making it available to those of the public who know how to find it. Obviously they are, hence this thread. My point is that most of our government and medical top authorities are not going to give this info to the general public or even to fellow docs. As evidenced by the fact tat they have not yet done so. Crickets.

As soon as I see Fauci et all on my TV, or in an article, saying "there is some pretty good evidence for D( or C or whatever), and it seems mostly harmless and cheap" rather than "there is no evidence for anything other than the precautions we advise every one to take, until there is a vaccine" I will stick by my claim of the obvious. When I do see the opposite, I will shout it to the heavens in celebration, praising Fauci or whoever makes it widely known. In the meantime I'm still fuming over the death of my buddy Brewster, who died in ICU a fe days after being admitted and put on the ventilator with Covid-19. Because I know the odds are great that no one ever even looked at his D status or considered, when nothing else they were doing was working worth a ****, giving the poor man some high dose IV vitamin C with methyprednisolone.

Buddy, do you have a title and author for that JAMA article, so that I can try and find it? Thanks.

Bill

Buddy Blank said...
Too long (we've discussed this before). I recommend upping B12.

Sigh. I'm sorry you don't have time to skim my posts. I try to give you a thorough response. I just skimmed back over it and it took me all of 2 minutes, maybe it it would take 3 or 4 minutes reading it from scratch. Maybe you have time to read these quotes from it?
"Thus, when I say "no matter how strongly I feel about vitamin D status and or IV vitamin C, zinc, etc, it is apparent this information is never going to be made known to the public by our government and most medical professionals", I obviously do not mean that some researchers, some where, are not going to do the research..............................As soon as I see Fauci et all on my TV, or in an article, saying "there is some pretty good evidence for D( or C or whatever), and it seems mostly harmless and cheap" rather than "there is no evidence for anything other than the precautions we advise every one to take, until there is a vaccine" I will stick by my claim of the obvious. When I do see the opposite, I will shout it to the heavens in celebration, praising Fauci or whoever makes it widely known.".

And the obvious is that they will never tell us about all of this research.

Also from that post: "Buddy, do you have a title and author for that JAMA article, so that I can try and find it? Thanks."
Bill

Some more interesting(to me at least)science has come in. This study is looking at various forms of D in the body and most especially looking at free D vs bound D. Most of the Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D(which our doctors measure) is bound to vitamin D-binding protein (DBP), and a smaller amount to albumin and lipoproteins. The amount not bound to those is free/biologically active and is the part that accomplishes the many functions of D in the body . The amount bound vs free can vary with "Diseases or conditions that affect the synthesis of DBP or albumin thus have a huge impact on the amount of circulating total vitamin D". Perhaps this can partly account for the occasional conflicts in studies re: the value of vitamin D? Perhaps we can supplement with D or get lots of sun and raise our levels way up, but not always increase the amount that is free and biologically active? Something to consider.

This study followed 1970 community-dwelling men, aged 40–79, for 12.3 years average. Those with the lowest total Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D had an 83% increased all cause mortality(ACM) over those years. Those with the lowest free vitamin D had a 91% higher ACM. So, it appears adequate D was important either way, but perhaps if we are one of those with a problem that causes more D to be bound, we will see less potential benefit from higher levels of D in our blood, or from a given amount of supplements?
https://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0070/ea0070aep184.htm
"Conclusions: Low total 25(OH)D levels and low total 1.25(OH)2D levels in community-dwelling middle-aged and elderly men have an increased future mortality risk. However, only low free 25(OH)D but not free 1.25(OH)2D levels predict all-cause mortality. Vitamin D deficiency is associated with a negative impact on general health and is predictive of a higher mortality risk."

By "only low free 25(OH)D but not free 1.25(OH)2D levels predict all-cause mortality.", they looked at several forms of FREE. Only the one predicted mortality, as did the total that we usually measure, though not as much as free 25(OH)D .

Apparently Fauci takes, wait for it, wait for it......

Vitamin D and Vitamin C supplements!

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/14/supplements-white-house-advisor-fauci-takes-every-day-to-help-keep-his-immune-system-healthy.html

Fauci said...
“If you are deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. So I would not mind recommending, and I do it myself taking vitamin D supplements,” Fauci, 79, said during an Instagram Live on Thursday...”

You cant make this stuff up

There is a whole rainbow of things that will help the immune system, Vitamins D and C included. One of the best vitamins for the immune system is one that I have taken regularly for the past 25 years: Vitamin Ex*.

It works wonders for the whole body, increasing energy, enhancing the immune system, strengthening bone and muscle, improving circulation, magnifying memory, improving sleep, lessening stress,boosting mood, and on and on. (*Ex = exercise)

My cardiologist said his patients want a pill to fix their cardiovascular system, so they can go ahead and live life the way they were before they had heart problems. He said that maybe 5% of his patients follow the guidelines for a healthy cardiovascular system and heart, especially diet, exercise, stress, and smoking. Another cardiologist, Dr Stephen Kopecky at the Mayo Clinic stated that medications don't do much unless patients make lifestyle changes.

For those who are vaxxers: It is recommended that you get the flu shot early this year (High Dose if you're over 65). Epidemiologists are recommending that to avoid a possible double viral whammy of Covid and the flu.

Post Edited (Tim G) : 9/14/2020 9:42:51 PM (GMT-6)

I am in total agreement that there is nothing shameful in what Fauci said. What is shameful is what he didn't say, while he knew enough himself to make sure that he is not deficient in D, and maybe even C. At one of the press conferences many months ago, when he did go to the trouble to say (paraphrase): "We are working hard on it, but there is no evidence that there is anything we have that will help", he could have also gone to the trouble of saying something like "however, there is enough evidence that making sure you are not deficient in vitamin D – as so many people are - will improve your odds against the virus". But neither he nor anyone else in the public light mentioned it. Even though it certainly appears that he was well aware of this, since he has NOW admitted to taking D and C. Months passed, with study after study being made public (for those who knew how to find them, but certainly not mentioned on the news or at any press conferences) about how important adequate blood levels of these vitamins are, but still crickets from Fauci and the rest. That is shameful.

And most assuredly, I totally agree that no doctors ever have ever recommended becoming deficient in any vitamin. But at the same time, most doctors never mention vitamins, period. It seems to me more and more do, but still many do not. None of mine have ever recommended that I supplement anything or certainly not recommended that I get sunshine. Though when asked, I have been told that it probably won't hurt anything, but probably won't help and probably will just make expensive urine. Anyone here ever heard that one? And I regularly ask people if their doctors have recommended that they supplement with vitamin D. Most have never heard of any such thing from their doctors, though a few have. (see next post on doctors attitudes towards supplements)