Michael A

Message

An appeal for vitamin D supplementation as a prophylactic for coronaviruses and influenza and a simple evolutionary theory for why this is plausible.

Dec 22, 2020•11

Michael A

Message

An appeal for vitamin D supplementation as a prophylactic for coronaviruses and influenza and a simple evolutionary theory for why this is plausible.

Dec 22, 2020•11

Michael A

An appeal for vitamin D supplementation as a prophylactic for coronaviruses and influenza and a simple evolutionary theory for why this is plausible.

Michael A

I'd like to bring home a case for vitamin D as a probable prophylactic for seasonal respiratory viruses like influenza or coronaviruses. Medical authorities already advise supplementing vitamin D in the winter but they haven't emphasized why it especially matters now. This is a no risk, low cost, low effort intervention so our standard of evidence doesn't need to be all that high here. We only need to have good cause to suspect that it helps, even if only just a little.

There quite a few studies showing that vitamin D deficiency is strongly associated with severity of infection. Here is a nice one. It found "VitD deficiency was associated with a 6-fold... (read 2439 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Michael A

Michael A

An appeal for vitamin D supplementation as a prophylactic for coronaviruses and influenza and a simple evolutionary theory for why this is plausible.

Michael A

Michael A

An appeal for vitamin D supplementation as a prophylactic for coronaviruses and influenza and a simple evolutionary theory for why this is plausible.