Major flaws in 2022 rumor that vitaminD worsens Alzheimer's dementia: Nothing was done correctly in this study
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Major flaws in 2022 rumor that vitaminD worsens Alzheimer's dementia: Nothing was done correctly in this study
Why I don’t think any of this is of any importance to doctors/family taking care of human patients
Millions of people will die this year from the consequences of malnutrition, overconsumption, nutritional deficiencies, and from the intentional confusing of the medical literature by the medical-science machine which relentlessly churns out a mountain of irrelevant and intentionally contradictory data on nutrition and other safe and effective treatments such as melatonin.
Ultimately, this type of research is simply strategic stupidity designed to disempower patients and keep us all drug-dependent.
Publication and what they tried to conclude:
Title: Vitamin D supplementation worsens Alzheimer's progression: Animal model and human cohort studies. Authors: Rai-Hua Lai, Chih-Cheng Hsu, Ben-Hui Yu, Yu-Ru Lo, Yueh-Ying Hsu, Mei-Hsin Chen, Jyh-Lyh Juang. Published: 12 July 2022 Aging Cell, 21, e13670 doi.org/10.1111/acel.13670
Biased language, spin, slant: The first few paragraphs on the first 2 pages make the anti-nutrition spin of the article very clear to a careful reader; their embedded commentary is full of innuendo and reveals their bias before the study is described and probably before it was even performed.
Their conclusions: They claim to conclude the following, all of which they claim makes vitamin D appear hazardous with regard to Alzheimer’s disease (AlzDz) severity and mortality:
In their “double transgenic Alzheimer’s mouse model, overdosing these mice with vitamin D caused the brain pathology to get worse,
Calcitriol (1,25diOHD) in cancer cell (neuroblastoma) culture (in vitro, test-tube) made the AlzDz-related pathology worse,
Retrospective cohort observation showed that patients treated with calcitriol had increased risk/consequences of Alzheimer’s type dementia.
Why I don’t think any of this is of any importance to doctors taking care of human patients, nor to patients/family trying to protect themselves
Admittedly, I read most of this article but not all of it because the basic methods appeared too flawed to warrant full attention; generally I scrub articles more closely but this one was so far off the mark that every aspect of it was irrelevant.
IRRELEVANT ANIMAL MODEL: I don’t care how double transgenic [genetically modified] mice respond to vitamin D. We have plenty of human patients with dementia so we should be looking at human data, and we have plenty of data showing safety and benefit, even when the studies are underpowered and underdosed (eg, J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2019 Dec;90(12):1347-1352).
BRUTAL OVERDOSING, BOLUS FALLACY: The dose of vitamin D used would be equivalent to vitamin D poisoning in humans, so the results are nonphysiologic and this irrelevant, eg, “Adding 8044 IU/kg of cholecalciferol (vitamin D3) to the diets of APP/PS1 AD mice 4.5 months old for 3 months resulted in more severe Aβ plaque deposits and reactive gliosis in the hippocampus compared to controls.” 8044 IU/kg for mice would be equivalent to 884,840 IU for a human of my size, which is overdosing/poisoning by any and all standards.
IRRELEVANT CULTURE MODEL: I don’t care how brain cancer (SH-SY5Y human neuroblastoma, ATCC CRL- 2266) cells respond to Calcitriol. And I don’t know if the dosing was correct, but I do know that most (80%) vitamin D activity comes from 25ohD and not 1,25diOHD.
CALCITRIOL PRESCRIPTION IS A SURROGATE MARKER FOR ILLNESS, VITAMIN D DEFICIENCY, AND LOW-QUALITY MEDICAL CARE: Retrospective cohort observation showed that patients treated with calcitriol had increased risk/consequences of Alzheimer’s type dementia; yeah—I am not surprised. Exclusive calcitriol use would be expected to impair vitamin D metabolism and signaling while also leaving the body functionally deficient because most vitamin D activity comes from Calcidiol/Calcifediol (25ohD) not Calcitriol (1,25diOHD).
Some of their pathology findings were interesting, but these are too distant for clinical application and could have been performed in humans; we have no shortage of patients with dementia, AlzDz, or vitamin D deficiency.
You can see the full document here, along with their supplemental materials.
