Good catch. They looked at cancer, cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke, death from cardiovascular causes), and deaths-from-cancer among men aged 50+ and women aged 55+. They found some “small but nonsignificant” improvements for the ones taking vitamin D (6.13% of vitamin D takers got cancer, versus 6.36% of people taking placebo vitamin D; 3.06% of vitamin D takers had cardiovascular events, versus 3.16% on placebo). They list a number of other things for which supplemental vitamin D didn’t help significantly but for those they don’t give the actual numbers (a cynic might conjecture that those numbers show small increases rather than small reductions).
On the other hand, they found a not-so-small reduction in cancer deaths among vitamin D takers (“a suggestive 17% reduction”; I guess the language indicates that this too was statistically insignificant because the numbers of deaths in the two cases were rather small, but I don’t know; if they exclude deaths in the first two years of follow-up, which apparently is a reasonable thing to do for slowly developing diseases like cancer, though that rationale feels to me like it makes more sense for measuring getting cancer rather than dying of it?, that becomes a 25% reduction.
They also found “a suggestive 23% reduction in cancer risk” for African Americans specifically.
Which is all interesting but there’s a bit of a whiff of data-mining here that makes me reluctant to get too excited.
More details here. The cynic mentioned above would be at least partly correct. For instance, cardiovascular deaths were 11% higher among people getting real vitamin D, as were incidences of a couple of specific kinds of cancer they tracked; all-cause mortality was pretty much identical between the two groups.
Good catch. They looked at cancer, cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke, death from cardiovascular causes), and deaths-from-cancer among men aged 50+ and women aged 55+. They found some “small but nonsignificant” improvements for the ones taking vitamin D (6.13% of vitamin D takers got cancer, versus 6.36% of people taking placebo vitamin D; 3.06% of vitamin D takers had cardiovascular events, versus 3.16% on placebo). They list a number of other things for which supplemental vitamin D didn’t help significantly but for those they don’t give the actual numbers (a cynic might conjecture that those numbers show small increases rather than small reductions).
On the other hand, they found a not-so-small reduction in cancer deaths among vitamin D takers (“a suggestive 17% reduction”; I guess the language indicates that this too was statistically insignificant because the numbers of deaths in the two cases were rather small, but I don’t know; if they exclude deaths in the first two years of follow-up, which apparently is a reasonable thing to do for slowly developing diseases like cancer, though that rationale feels to me like it makes more sense for measuring getting cancer rather than dying of it?, that becomes a 25% reduction.
They also found “a suggestive 23% reduction in cancer risk” for African Americans specifically.
Which is all interesting but there’s a bit of a whiff of data-mining here that makes me reluctant to get too excited.
More details here. The cynic mentioned above would be at least partly correct. For instance, cardiovascular deaths were 11% higher among people getting real vitamin D, as were incidences of a couple of specific kinds of cancer they tracked; all-cause mortality was pretty much identical between the two groups.