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12.02.2022

Take vitamin D and lower your risk of an autoimmune disease

People over 50 who take a vitamin D3 supplement reduce their risk of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. This is apparent from the American Vital trial, in which thousands of test subjects took a daily supplement containing 2000 IU of vitamin D for years.

Study
The researchers, who are affiliated with Harvard University, experimented with a group of 25871 over-50s, who, as far as the researchers could determine, represented the general population. In any case, they were not people who had previously been diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency.

Some of the subjects took a supplement containing 2000 IU of vitamin D3 every day for a total of 5.3 years, an equally large proportion took a placebo.

As a result of the supplementation, the subjects' vitamin D levels had risen by 40 percent after just one year - from an average of 29.8 nanograms per milliliter to 41.8 nanograms per milliliter.

Results
During the study, 155 subjects in the placebo group developed an autoimmune disease. There were 123 of them in the supplementation group. This implies that vitamin D supplementation reduced the risk of an autoimmune disorder by 22 percent.

Fish oil
We did not provide a full description of the design of this study above. The Harvardians also gave some of their subjects a supplement that provided 1 gram of fish oil daily.

There were study participants who took only fish oil, study participants who took fish oil and vitamin D, study participants who took only vitamin D and study participants who took no supplement at all.

In the group that used fish oil, whether or not in combination with vitamin D, the risk of an autoimmune disease was 15 percent smaller than in the group that did not take fish oil. However, this difference was not statistically significant.

Conclusion
The clinical importance of this trial is high because these are well tolerated, non-toxic supplements", the Harvardians wrote, "and other effective treatments to reduce the incidence of autoimmune diseases are lacking."

Source:
BMJ 2022;376:e066452.

More:
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