wedrifid comments on Even if you have a nail, not all hammers are the same - Less Wrong

95 Post author: PhilGoetz 29 March 2010 06:09PM

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Comment author: neq1 28 October 2010 02:17:16PM 2 points [-]

If you look at Table 2 in the paper, it shows doses of each vitamin for every study that is considered low risk for bias. I count 9 studies that have vitamin A <10,000 IU and vitamin E <300 IU, which is what PhilGoetz said are good dosage levels.

The point estimates from those 9 studies (see figure 2) are: 2.88, 0.18, 3.3, 2.11, 1.05, 1.02, 0.78, 0.87, 1.99. (<1 favors supplements, >1 favors control)

Based on this quick look at the studies, I don't see any reason to believe that a "hockey stick" model will show a benefit of supplements at lower dose levels.

Comment author: wedrifid 28 October 2010 03:54:53PM 0 points [-]

Based on this quick look at the studies, I don't see any reason to believe that a "hockey stick" model will show a benefit of supplements at lower dose levels.

The titular contention used the word 'kill'. That's what hockey sticks tend to do.

Comment author: gwern 14 September 2013 06:07:53PM *  0 points [-]

But Goetz implies that the vitamins may have benefits in the right regime:

This is not how vitamins work. Vitamin A is toxic in doses over 15,000 IU/day, and vitamin E is toxic in doses over 400 IU/day (Miller et al. 2004, Meta-Analysis: High-Dosage Vitamin E Supplementation May Increase All-Cause Mortality; Berson et al. 1993, Randomized trial of vitamin A and vitamin E supplementation for retinitis pigmentosa.). The RDA for vitamin A is 2500 IU/day for adults. Good dosage levels for vitamin A appear to be under 10,000 IU/day, and for E, less than 300 IU/day. (Sadly, studies rarely discriminate in their conclusions between dosage levels for men and women. Doing so would give more useful results, but make it harder to reach the coveted P < .05 or P < .01.)

...Vitamins, like any medicine, have an inverted-J-shaped response curve. If you graph their health effects, with dosage on the horizontal access, and some measure of their effects - say, change to average lifespan - on the vertical axis, you would get an upside-down J. (If you graph the death rate on the vertical axis, as in this study, you would get a rightside-up J.) That is, taking a moderate amount has some good effect; taking a huge a mount has a large bad effect.

It would be a strange usage of 'good' if all Goetz meant by it was 'increases fatalities by too small an amount to easily detect' rather than 'increases some desirable outcome'.

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