According to some web sources, taking a higher-than-recommended dose of vitamin D every day may reduce the risk of being hospitalised due to any cause, according to a relatively short, small study 12. Vitamin D is naturally made in the skin during exposure to sunlight and is found in some foods, such as egg yolks and oily fish 12.
However, the study did not prove a causal link between vitamin D and hospitalisation risk, and the researchers cautioned that more research is needed to confirm the findings. They also warned that taking too much vitamin D can have negative side effects, such as kidney stones and nausea 12.
Therefore, it is not advisable to take high doses of vitamin D without consulting a doctor first. The recommended daily intake of vitamin D for adults is 15 micrograms or 600 international units 3. You can get enough vitamin D from a balanced diet, moderate sun exposure, and regular supplements if needed.
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Taking a large amount of vitamin D every day might lower your chances of going to the hospital. However, this finding comes from a study that was short and had few participants. Vitamin D is a substance that our skin produces when it is exposed to sunlight, and we can also get it from some foods, like egg yolks and fatty fish. Vitamin D helps us have strong bones and a healthy immune system that can fight off infections. Some health authorities, such as the UK’s national health services, suggest that adults take 10 micrograms, or 400 international units (IU), of vitamin D daily, while the US National Institutes of Health recommend 600 IU for most adults. They also warn against taking more than 4000 IU per day, because too much vitamin D can make calcium build up in the blood, which can cause problems like nausea and kidney stones. Patrick LaRiccia and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania recently discovered that taking 5000 IU of vitamin D every day could reduce the risk of symptoms similar to the flu. They wondered if this dose, which is higher than the recommended one, could also have other positive effects. So they asked 196 adults, who were 47 years old on average and knew the dose they were taking, to take 5000 IU of vitamin D3, which is the type of vitamin D that animals produce, every day for about nine months. Since vitamin D takes some time to accumulate in the blood, the team only looked at the data from two months after the first dose until the end of the study. The researchers also looked at the data of more than 1900 people who did not take the 5000 IU daily dose of vitamin D or any other pill, such as a placebo. However, they could take vitamin D supplements if they wanted to. LaRiccia says that it would not be ethical to tell people not to take any supplement, given the possible benefits of vitamin D. At the end of the study, about 20 per cent of the participants in this control group answered a survey that asked them about their vitamin D use, and 311 of them said they had been taking a supplement.
The group’s mean age was 50 and they took an average of 1318 IU of vitamin D. Those who received 5000 IU daily for 10 months had a reduced chance of hospitalization for any reason, and needed less emergency or intensive care than the other group 1. But the team, led by LaRiccia, could not exclude the age gap as a potential explanation for these outcomes, since the high-dose group was on average three years younger and may have avoided hospital visits for that reason. The results may have also been influenced by the ethnic composition of the two groups, which had fewer Hispanic and Latino people in the high-dose group, he says. The study was small and encouraging, but it did not consider the placebo effect, which could improve symptoms if people think they are taking an effective treatment, says Manson from Harvard University. The study was also too brief to assess any long-term safety concerns of such a large daily amount of vitamin D
Article reference:CarissaWong
Carissa Wong was formerly an intern and a junior reporter at New Scientist. She has a PhD in cancer immunology from Cardiff University, in collaboration with the University of Bristol. .
https://twitter.com/CarissaCWWong
1 Comments
very informative needs more polising
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