Vitamin D and cancer in the news (again)

[AussieNeil]

CLL is not the only cancer where the blood serum level of vitamin D has been found to correlate with survival time:

Vitamin D May Boost Colon Cancer Survival, Study Finds

consumer.healthday.com/canc...

'"We found that patients who had vitamin D levels at the highest category had improved survival and improved progression-free survival, compared with patients in the lowest category," said lead author Dr. Kimmie Ng, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Those patients survived one-third longer than patients with low levels of vitamin D -- an average 32.6 months, compared with 24.5 months, the researchers found.

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The study only found an association between vitamin D levels and colon cancer survival rates. It did not prove cause and effect.'

Health News Review's take on the article - taking particular issue with the inappropriate title

healthnewsreview.org/review...

The recommendations at the end of the parent article hold true for us too:

'Everyone should maintain healthy vitamin D levels anyway, to protect their bone health, Ng and Krishnamurthi said.

Based on this new study, Krishnamurthi said she would emphasize the importance of vitamin D for patients with colon cancer.

"They should take supplements to bring it into normal range, because we know it is good for bone health and it may have an anti-cancer effect," she said.

However, "if someone has a normal vitamin D level, I wouldn't take supplements to increase it because we won't know the true effect on cancer until we see the results of a clinical trial," she said.'

We'll need to wait for the results of the Mayo Clinic vitamin D clinical trial before we'll hopefully know whether higher levels of vitamin D help us live longer or just feed our CLL.

More articles on Vitamin D and CLL on this site:

healthunlocked.com/search/v...

Neil

Photo: Lots of vitamin D generating sunlight going to waste

[HAIRBEAR_UK Founder Admin]

Thanks for this Neil, where are we in the argument about evidence in relation to CLL? Do you know if anything CLL related been published by the CLL clinical research on this recently?

Thanks

Nick

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to HAIRBEAR_UK]

Nick, I'm not aware of any new research reports, but here is the paper on what Mayo Clinic found with respect to time to treatment and overall survival time for CLL with different vitamin D serum levels:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

Neil

[Cllcanada Top Poster CURE Hero]

That VitD article was published in 2008... I knew I had read it years ago.... Healthday does this all the time...

jco.ascopubs.org/content/26...

Here is a site trying to bring some balance on this stuff... and comment on the popular but often inaccurate and sometimes misleading press... ( thanks to Jack on ACOR for this link)

healthnewsreview.org

healthnewsreview.org/review...

[SeymourB in reply to Cllcanada]

That healthnewsreview looks like a great site to watch.

Thanks for posting!