Deans' stroke musings: Vitamin D fails again to affect CV mortality

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.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Vitamin D fails again to affect CV mortality

And this is one of my many vitamins I take. Should I stop and save my money?
http://www.theheart.org/article/1327841.do?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=20111215_EN_Heartwire
A new British study is the latest in a long line of research that has failed to find any impact of vitamin D on cardiovascular-disease mortality [1]. The results also showed no benefit of vitamin D on cancer incidence or mortality, say Dr Alison Avenell (University of Aberdeen, Scotland) et al.

"We don't have the evidence yet to say that this dose of vitamin D can prevent deaths from heart disease or cancer," Avenell told heartwire. She and her colleagues report the long-term follow-up from the placebo-controlled Randomised Evaluation of Calcium or Vitamin D (RECORD) trial online November 23, 2011 in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Vitamin D has become somewhat of a panacea lately, following the failure of many other vitamins to have any impact on CVD morbidity or mortality, with many patients taking vitamin-D supplements and/or doctors prescribing it, without any real evidence of benefit. One expert has previously told heartwire the situation resembles "a massive uncontrolled experiment."

Avenell agrees with other physicians in the field that the results of large, ongoing trials are needed before any definitive recommendation can be made regarding vitamin-D supplementation. One is the 20 000-patient US Vitamin D and Omega-3 Trial (VITAL) study, results of which won't be available until 2016 or 2017, and the second is the UK Vitamin D and Longevity (VIDAL) trial, which is currently enrolling 1600 patients but plans, in the long run, to recruit as many patients as VITAL, says Avenell.

RECORD adds to body of evidence on vitamin D: No benefit on CV mortality

The RECORD study was conducted in over 5000 people aged 70 or older with a previous low-risk fracture, 85% of whom were women. Participants were randomly allocated into one of four groups: daily vitamin D3 (800 IU), calcium carbonate (1000 mg), both, or placebo for 24 to 62 months, with a follow-up of three years after intervention. The main outcome measures were all-cause mortality, vascular-disease mortality, cancer mortality, and cancer incidence.

Daily vitamin-D supplementation did not significantly affect all-cause and vascular-disease mortality or cancer incidence and mortality in the intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis.

Supplementation with calcium also had no significant effects, in contrast to a systematic review published in 2010, which included earlier data from RECORD that showed an increased risk of MI with calcium, says Avenell.

In a post hoc analysis adjusting for compliance, thus with fewer participants, trends for reduced mortality with vitamin D and increased mortality with calcium "were accentuated, although the results remain nonsignificant," she and her colleagues say.

Hazard ratio for mortality, vascular-disease mortality, and cancer mortality and incidence for vitamin D and calcium, compared with placebo