How effective is vitamin D supplementation in COVID-19? Nutrients_MDPI Unibo vitaminD coronavirus covid COVID19
By Dr. Liji Thomas, MDSep 13 2022Reviewed by Danielle Ellis, B.Sc. The coronavirus disease 2019 , caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 , led to hundreds of millions of infections worldwide, with over 6 million deaths so far. Many researchers have suggested that low vitamin D levels increase the risk of clinical infection and severe and fatal COVID-19.
Dietary manipulation has been a prime route of immunomodulation during the pandemic, with the supplementation of various vitamins and minerals being suggested to help strengthen the immune system. However, most of these failed to make it into the mainstream for want of robust clinical evidence. Is vitamin D supplementation useful? An analysis of multiple studies showed that supplementing with vitamin D reduced the risk of severe disease by >60% and mortality risk by 65%. Following this up, the authors also observed that a dose-response relationship appeared to be present, where high-dose vitamin D improved the prognosis of such patients.
This remains to be validated; however, since another large international trial, COVID-VIT-D trial, patients who got one dose of 100,000 IU vitamin D at the time of hospital admission improved only if their calcifediol levels were higher initially.