A ray of hope in the quest to lower the risk of cancer
Recently, vitamin D has set the world of medicine abuzz, thanks to some very promising research findings. It can cut the risk of various cancers by as much as 60 percent in older women!
This is spectacular news for anyone wanting to add to their arsenal of cancer preventives.
I’ve been talking about vitamin D with my patients since I began practicing medicine. It first became the subject of study many years ago when it was noted that cancer rates were higher in northern regions than in southern regions.
The difference?
The amount of sunlight. Your skin needs sunlight in order to make vitamin D (D3 or cholecalciferol) in your body.
New research brings great promise for vitamin D and its positive effects in cutting risks of getting cancer. Initially designed to look at the effects of calcium and vitamin D on bone health, the research produced quite a surprise when an unrelated result was discovered. What made the study unique was the fact that researchers boosted and measured blood levels of vitamin D—and followed a group of virtually identical patients from start to finish.
The researchers tested a total of 1,179 healthy women with an average age in the mid-60s. They were divided into three groups. One group received calcium and vitamin D3 supplements, 1,000 IUs daily. Another group received just a calcium supplement, and the last group received a placebo.
Again, researchers went into this study mainly to study bone health, but were amazed at the relative lower cancer risk that surfaced!
What they found was that only three percent of women developed cancer during four years of calcium and vitamin D supplementation. In the group receiving only calcium, four percent got cancer. And in the placebo group—seven percent were diagnosed with the disease.
So the first two groups, each taking one or the other method of supplementation, had a 60 percent lower risk of cancer than did the group that received placebos. The research team adjusted further for the fact that patients diagnosed in the first year of the four-year study were likely to have already been in the early stages of developing cancer when they entered the study. This brought the risk factor to 77 percent lower for the group that received both calcium and vitamin D.
For the patients who received only calcium, the risk of contracting cancer was lowered by just 47 percent as compared with the placebo group, even with the exclusion of first-year diagnosed cancers. This suggests that calcium may have little effect on its own for lowering cancer risk, but its effectiveness in doing so is not being ruled out entirely.
Guidelines have previously recommended getting between 200 and 600 IUs of vitamin D. I tell my patients to take 1,000 to 2,000 IUs per day, as long as they’re not already deficient in this important vitamin. I recommend you have your doctor check your vitamin D level. Make sure it’s your 25-hydroxy vitamin D level, as the 1,25 hydroxy vitamin D level is an unreliable indicator of your true vitamin D status. Based on my conversations with several cancer experts and my interpretation of the literature, for maximum cancer protection, you want levels in the range of 50 nanomoles per liter or higher.
