Deans' stroke musings: Vitamin D does not improve endothelial function or arterial stiffness, but it remains the vitamin du jour

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Vitamin D does not improve endothelial function or arterial stiffness, but it remains the vitamin du jour

Supplement info to be correlated with your doctor.
http://www.theheart.org/article/1315347.do?utm_campaig

n=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=20111121_EN_Heartwire
Data from a prospective, randomized, placebo-controlled trial has cast real doubt on the alleged cardioprotective benefits of vitamin D. Researchers performing the small study report that treatment with vitamin D for four months had no significant effect on endothelial function, vascular stiffness, or inflammation in healthy postmenopausal women.

"At this point in time, from the standpoint of heart-disease prevention, we have no evidence to prescribe vitamin D to patients, and we have no evidence not to give it," senior investigator Dr James Stein (University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI) told heartwire. "We have other agents that have been proven effective to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. In the US, with many patients taking the supplement and many physicians prescribing it, some of whom are megadosing it, what we really have going on is a massive, uncontrolled experiment."

The study, led by Dr Adam Gepner (University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health), was presented here this week at the American Heart Association 2011 Scientific Sessions. It included 114 postmenopausal women with serum 25-OH vitamin-D concentrations >10 and <60 ng/mL. The women were randomized to 2500 IU of vitamin D3 or placebo for four months.

Confirming several previous observational studies, the patients in the study with low levels of vitamin D were more likely to have a multitude of cardiovascular risk factors compared with patients with significantly higher levels at baseline. Stein acknowledged his study has limitations—it was small and only four months long and did not look at hard cardiovascular events—but the group saw no evidence of change across multiple surrogate end points, including endothelial function, arterial stiffness, C-reactive protein (CRP) levels, and blood pressure.

"I am concerned that vitamin D has become the new vitamin C or vitamin E," Stein told heartwire. "It has been touted as a panacea for all sorts of conditions, including muscle aches, mood disorders, and fatigue, and is now being used by many physicians as a way to prevent heart disease."

The 20 000-patient Vitamin D and Omega-3 Trial (VITAL) study is currently ongoing, but results of the study won't be available until 2016 or 2017. The study, which is led by researchers from the Brigham and Women's Hospital in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute and the National Health, Lung, and Blood Institute, is a randomized clinical trial investigating whether taking 2000 IU of vitamin D3 daily or 1 g of omega-3 fatty acids reduces the risk of developing cancer, heart disease, and stroke in people who do not have a prior history of these illnesses.