79 Reflections Upon 2009 - Vitamin D

I'm a skeptic when it comes to most things involving cancer prevention or cancer cures. If it isn't backed by double blind scientific trials with a sufficiently large pool of participants, then I will take the conclusions with a grain of salt only.

In 2009 a study came out that pointed out high levels of Vitamin D as having something to do with better odds of surviving breast cancer. I appreciated the way that Dr. Susan Love described the study and its conclusions. The study points out, in a nutshell, that people with higher levels of Vitamin D in their bodies seem to be less likely to develop breast cancer and those who get breast cancer anyway are more likely to survive the disease. Dr. Love challenges that perhaps these people had higher levels of Vitamin D because they spend more time outside and maybe they are outside more because they are exercising more, so we can't conclusively claim that elevated Vitamin D levels alone are absolutely tied to cancer prevention. Maybe Vitamin D helps. Maybe it doesn't.

Then two things happened for me around the same time.

Thing one was that I went to my regular annual checkup with my oncologist. This man keeps up to date with all the breaking news concerning cancer. He is also not likely to grasp at the latest thing without significant evidence that it is meaningful, valid and relevant. When I showed up for the routine lab work that always comes before checkups, the nurse informed me that my doctor now tests all breast cancer patients for Vitamin D levels.

It turned out that my level was low. (My checkup went fine, by the way. I'm still living with NED - No Evidence of Disease.) I got a prescription for an obscene amount of Vitamin D - 20,000 International Units (IU) a week for six weeks - and afterwards followed instructions to take an over-the-counter 1,000 IU per day supplement. If my oncologist believes that bumping up my Vitamin D level will help prevent recurrence, then I'll stand up and take notice.

The second of the two things was an article published by Cure Today. Here is the online version of "The Vitamin D Difference."

This article fascinated me because it drew my attention to the possibility of low Vitamin D levels being a factor in why breast cancer is more deadly to people with dark skin. (I would say "African Americans" but really the issue transcends Americans altogether.)

Here is a powerful quote from the second page of the article:

“A question you really have to ask yourself is, ‘How are African-Americans like Norwegians?’ ” says cancer biologist and epidemiologist Gary Schwartz, PhD, because they have almost the same rate of death from one of the most common cancers in the world.

Schwartz, a researcher at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, says, “They don’t look a lot alike, and they’re not genetically alike,” but it turns out that members of both groups tend to have low levels of vitamin D in their blood.

Oh!

So Norwegians have low levels of Vitamin D because they don't get a lot of sunlight due to their location on the planet.  And dark skinned people have low levels of Vitamin D because the pigmentation of their skin decreases the amount of Vitamin D their bodies create when exposed to sunlight.

Here are two more paragraphs from page four of the same article:

Recommendations for adequate vitamin D supplements depend somewhat on a person's lifestyle, skin color, age, and overall health. A light-skinned lifeguard in a bathing suit on a sunny summer day probably synthesizes as much as 20,000 or 30,000 units of vitamin D, says Giovannucci. People with very dark skin probably need about 10 times as much sun exposure to synthesize the same amount of vitamin D as people with very light skin—or may need more from supplements if they aren't getting that much sun exposure.


Obese people may need more vitamin D (because the vitamin is sequestered in fat), and so do people who can’t readily absorb nutrients from their gut into their bloodstream. Also, people need more supplementary vitamin D as they age, because their skin and kidneys gradually become less efficient at synthesizing vitamin D and converting it into its active form.

That last paragraph, in my opinion, hypothesizes that obese people tend to be more susceptible to getting cancer because their bodies store Vitamin D in their fat.  Older people are at a higher risk for getting cancer because their bodies have gradually changed to where they produce less Vitamin D from the same amount of sunlight.  That could explain why obesity and age are risk factors for getting breast cancer.
 
The article concludes by stating that it is difficult to get enough Vitamin D from diet alone, and that supplements may be necessary.  My oncologist feels that supplements are necessary for me, and I'm in favor of doing what I can to reduce my risk of recurrence.

So, starting in 2009, I'm taking Vitamin D supplements daily.

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