“Effect of calcifediol treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive care unit admission and mortality among patients hospitalized for COVID-19: A pilot randomized clinical study”
Highlights
•The vitamin D endocrine system have a variety of actions on cells and tissues involved in COVID-19 progression.
•Early calcifediol (25-hydroxyvitamin D) treatment to hospitalized COVID-19 patients significantly reduced intensive care unit admissions-Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the COVID-19.
• Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease.
Wow this is amazing! I have been using the liquid vitamin D version of calcifediol for many years as I use it for my scalp due to dryness and flakiness. It’s extremely strong and works well. I could never imagine that it could be used for COVID-19.
This is high dose but is being used on people sick enough to be admitted to hospital. If you take it regularly your base levels should be high enough. Maybe take extra if you feel like you are coming down with something.
"Of 50 patients treated with calcifediol, one required admission to the ICU (2%), while of 26 untreated patients, 13 required admission ... Of the patients treated with calcifediol, none died, and all were discharged, without complications. 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."
Vitamin D deficiency is commonplace. I usually spend an hour, at least, outdoors every day, but with sunscreen. I take 7000 units of vitamin D3 daily to get my level in the middle of the desirable range. This is a high-dose. Individual needs for supplementation vary - best to get your blood levels checked to establish proper dosage.
Dexamethasone for severely ill covid has been shown to be effective also and it is worth noting that it increases vitamin D receptor (VDR) activity - basically it potentiates vitamin D.
Beate Ritz answered some questions I had about vitamin D and PD during a video conference - she said that there was a finding about genetic variant for VDR being a risk factor for PD. Here's a recent reference for a Chinese population study:
Vitamin D for covid is a no-brainer (interventional studies have shown it reduces risk of development of ARDS from both infection and trauma - so basically it doesn't matter what the cause is) and I don't know why public health officials just don't tell everyone to get their D level checked and supplement accordingly. It's not a panacea, it won't necessarily prevent infection, but at a population level it should reduce the number of severe cases and fatalities -and it will reduce the incidence of colon cancer to boot.
Here's a link to an article co-authored by Ritz on a study of VDR genetic variants and PD risk, unfortunately the full article is paywalled: sciencedirect.com/science/a...
Vitamin C transporters are sodium dependent and Michael Lustgarten says he takes vitamin C with sodium for improved absorption (personally I lean more toward dietary sodium restriction for general health under normal circumstances). Lustgarten is a researcher at Tufts and has a YT channel ( interesting but I take what he says with a grain of salt).
I was very intrigued by something Ruslan Medzhitov said about sodium in a video on glucose and influenza mortality; I checked the original publication and there was no mention of the effect of sodium , unfortunately. I am wondering if the putative benefit of sodium has something to do with vitamin C:
It's also interesting to note that high sodium diet (HSD) is not found to increase rate of progression in MSA; HSD is used to mitigate orthostatic hypotension. Generally HSD increases neuroinflammation, so why no problem in MSA? Vitamin C, or perhaps the osmotic stress increase Hsp70 production? - IDK.
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PD, ill health retirement and consultants input.
High uric acid diet for PD?
