Here’s the problem if, as most people do, when you run
across a medical news story that might affect you, you read only headlines or
at most a paragraph or three: you often get a totally wrong impression of what
that study or report was really about.
That’s certainly what’s going to happen to a lot of people
who only cursorily read a recent report about vitamin D and calcium
supplements, a report that affects millions and millions of people.
This report was a draft recommendation from the U.S.
Preventive Services Task Force, a government body with a mandate to review
current preventive strategies and recommendations, and the experts on this body
often swim against the popular tide, as they did in coming out recently with a recommendation against routine screening for prostate cancer.
So in their most recent recommendation, the USPSTF has
really roiled some experts because it has come out strongly opposed to low-dose
supplementation with vitamin D and calcium for the prevention of fractures in
post-menopausal women.
Please note: that’s low-dose supplementation, which the
PSTF defined as 400 IU of vitamin D and 1,000 mg of calcium.
When it comes to higher doses, such as the one so many
experts think may be appropriate for such women, namely 800 IU of vitamin D,
the PSTF says there is not enough evidence either for or against this dose; in
other words, it might work, it might not.
Yet nearly every news story about this recommendation came
out with a headline like this one: USPSTF
Says No to Vitamin D, Calcium for Older Women.
Well, no, it didn’t.
It said no to a low dose, maybe
to a higher one, so women taking a higher dose may be doing the right thing
although we need way more data about that choice.
Equally interesting, the PSTF
came out very strongly opposed to recommending the use of vitamin D for cancer
prevention, which flies in the face of recommendations from many authoritative
groups like the Canadian Cancer Society for example, who do recommend taking
vitamin D for cancer prevention.
But as I have been saying for
years and the PSTF agrees with me, it’s still very unclear that extra vitamin D
will in fact reduce the risk of cancer.
Even if it is an anti-cancer
agent, we still don’t know what form of vitamin D to recommend for that purpose
(vitamin D is sold mostly as vitamin D 2, although lots of experts believe that
vitamin D3 is far more effective at doing what vitamin D is supposed to do.
And we clearly also don’t have a
clue about the dose that’s needed. Or whether some people are genetically more
susceptible to(or protected against) a low vitamin D blood level.
Andon and on.
Whether or not to take vitamin D
supplements (and/or calcium supplements, which have been linked several times
to a higher risk of heart attacks) remains an individualized decision based on
many variables: inform yourself thoroughly about the pros and cons and then
decide for yourself what to do.
