Dietary vitamin D and risk of heart failure in the Physicians’ Health Study
Clinical Nutrition, doi:10.1016/j.clnu.2015.04.011, Available online 22 April 2015
Jeremy Robbins, MD, Andrew Petrone, MPH, J.Michael Gaziano, MD, MPH, Luc Djoussé, MD, MPH, ScD,
Only 2.3% of 19,000 Physicians (US?) took any vitamin D a decade ago
And the median supplementation at the time was a measly 200 IU
Now we can understand why physicians are generally reluctant to prescribe vitamin D,
they did not believe in it enough to take it themselves.
They had been (incorrectly) trained to believe that
- >2,000 IU of vitamin D was toxic
- supplements provided no benefits
Yes, we agree with the study conclusions - no heart benefits from taking 200 IU of vitamin D
See also VitaminDWiki
Overview Cardiovascular and vitamin D
17 reasons why are doctors reluctant to accept vitamin D
Great Vitamin D webinar for doctors - Plotnikoff Nov 2013
Vitamin D is the most common nutritional deficiency worldwide – Best Practice BMJ Dec 2012
Background
Experimental studies have demonstrated the role of vitamin D in key pathways related to cardiovascular health. While several studies have investigated the impact of vitamin D therapy on outcomes in subjects with prevalent heart failure, limited research exists on the relationship of dietary vitamin D consumption with the risk of heart failure. Thus, we sought to investigate whether dietary vitamin D consumption was associated with a lower risk of incident heart failure in a large prospective cohort of male physicians.
Methods and Results
We prospectively studied 19,635 males from the Physicians’ Health Study. Dietary vitamin D information was obtained from a baseline food frequency questionnaire, and heart failure information was obtained by questionnaire and validated in a subsample. Mean age was 66.4 years.
Median dietary vitamin D consumption was 200.4 IU and only 2.3% of the subjects used vitamin D supplements.
After an average follow-up of 9.3 years, there were 858 new cases of heart failure identified. Higher intake of dietary vitamin D was not associated with incident heart failure in a multivariable adjusted model: hazard ratios (95% CI) of incident heart failure were 1.0 (reference), 1.29 (1.04 to 1.60), 1.17 (0.94 to 1.46), 1.22 (0.98 to 1.53), and 1.16 (0.92 to 1.46) from lowest to highest age- and energy-adjusted vitamin D quintile, respectively, after adjusting for age, BMI, race, exercise, alcohol use, smoking, calories, and prevalent atrial fibrillation (p for linear trend = 0.64).
Conclusions
These data are consistent with a lack of an association between dietary vitamin D and incident heart failure in this population of professionally-employed middle-aged males.