Jeffrey Bland discusses a trial giving 2000 IU vitamin D plus 1500 mg calcium daily versus placebo. The supplemented group showed 30% lower cancer risk, but the result wasn't statistically significant. Bland suggests genetic differences in vitamin D receptor genes might explain why some people benefit while others don't.
Questions this video answers
2000 IU per day
1500 mg per day, given as 500 mg three times daily
32.8 ng/mL
Marginally sufficient
About 0.7 (not statistically significant)
Well, here's a little bit of news.
To use to share with you. As you probably know, there's this long standing discussion about the role of vitamin D and calcium in prevention of cancer.
And it's been back and forth, there's.
Epidemiological and associated studies and it's known that cancer incidence is lower in areas of higher solar exposure and higher in.
Areas of lower solar exposure.
So there's suggested vitamin D component to that. And we've seen some limited intervention trials and some anal work, some in vitro cell biology that all points towards vitamin D and calcium synergistically being chemo preventive in the form of cancer.
Well, an intervention trial was just published.
That explores this and I think it's very interesting. Using 2000ius of vitamin D daily as a supplement along with 1500mg of calcium, 500mg given three times a day. And there's also obviously a placebo group. And the question is, did you see.
Any difference or was there any difference.
Seen in cancer incidence in the group? After years of supplementation, they point out that the mean serum vitamin D level in this population group that was studied was 32.8 nanograms per mil, which is not in the range of deficient. That would be marginally sufficient. Right. We say anything above 30 nanograms per mil is marginally sufficient. So this was not a deficient group. And what they found in the results of the study was that the vitamin D calcium group did not reach statistically significant in its reduction of incidence. It had about a 0.7 relative risk factor to the control which didn't meet the condition of statistical significance.
It needed to get down to around a 0.6.
What that means is about a 60% or 40% reduction. However, if you look at different ways.
Of cutting the data, it at least.
Suggested that certain individuals may have significantly benefited from the calcium vitamin D. There was no sign of of adverse effects in people that were taking that dose over the period of intake of the study.
But I think it at least led.
Us into a thought that there could be certain cohorts or certain individuals who were more sensitive to and had a higher response rate in the chemo prevention of cancer as a consequence of calcium and vitamin D. Which raises this whole question of do we need to cut.
Data into smaller groups that we don't just look at aggregate averages anymore.
We look at individuals with say certain polymorphisms of vitamin D receptor or certain polymorphisms of the vitamin D synthesizing enzymes and see if in fact certain genotypes are more susceptible or more advantaged upon supplementation than others.
But I at least feel that the.
Study led us in to recognize that there is at least the impression that calcium and vitamin D at the levels that were administered have some therapeutic value in chemo prevention. And now the question is in what individuals? So we're going from generalized population nutrition again back to what you would call nutrigenomically focused individual nutrition.
