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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

HN health posts tend to get posted without context and you'll get a pile of people [inadvertantly, I'm sure] pushing their supplement regime as a way to stave off clinical depression et al.

This paper is NOT saying that low VitD causes psychiatric admission, just that patients may require supplements to bring them back to healthy levels.

You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight so it's reasonable to suggest that these people with psychiatric issues and low VitD are likely to be shut-ins.

The paper says as much... But people have a strange habit of ignoring the paper and latching their own beliefs onto the headline.

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>You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight so it's reasonable to suggest that these people with psychiatric issues and low VitD are likely to be shut-ins.

As a point of interest, when I lived in an American southwest desert city, vitamin D deficiency was rampant. When doctors took new patients, the first thing they did was write a script for vitamin D, which the pharmacies were constantly out of, so people who cared enough just bought OTC supplements. Most people didn't care, though.

The widespread D problem was because they spend so much time inside, and the buildings were designed with few windows, or very small windows.

So, a different kind of shut-in. Societal shut-ins, if you will.

Also on a similar tangent, I remember a photo in Time magazine from the 80's showing children in schools in Siberia standing mostly-naked around quartz lights daily to get their D.

I think with all the discussion of skin cancer, aging, sun spots, etc... people have forgotten the health benefits of good ol' sunshine.

> The widespread D problem was because they spend so much time inside, and the buildings were designed with few windows, or very small windows.

Apparently most windows block UVB which is what triggers vitamin D synthesis in your skin.

> HN health posts tend to get posted without context and you'll get a pile of people [inadvertantly, I'm sure] pushing their supplement regime as a way to stave off clinical depression et al.

I wouldn't say people are necessarily "pushing" their personal regimes, more often than not people are merely exchanging their personal experiences with certain issues.

Personally, I've had actual relief from a really annoying issue (nightly teeth gnashing) thanks to a helpful HN comment pointing me in the direction of Magnesium. I'm still thankful and glad that happened!

Btw: The headline is spot on with what the study found. I don't get what you are suggesting there with "reasonable to suggest that these people with psychiatric issues and low VitD are likely to be shut-ins".

Only 8.7% of all patients were vitamin D sufficient at admission. They didn't get their insufficiency from being admitted, they already usually have it when getting there.

A "shut-in" is someone who spends a lot of time at home alone, not getting any sunlight. Then when their symptoms of mental illness are manifested enough to require hospital admission, they are tested for vitamin D at that point and it's unsurprisingly low.

I guess that that is a thing that could happen in the temperate and frigid zones of the Earth. It would be interesting, though, to attempt to replicate the study in a tropical region, where it's nearly impossible to not get enough sun, even indoors.

Glass windows block the kind of UV radiation you need to produce Vitamin D. You really have to actually go outside to produce it.

In some areas the windows contain enough quartz to let UV through, we found.

Thank you for mentioning the Magnesium & teeth grinding link. I'll be giving that a try (and after some reading, I appear to have a magnesium deficiency).

So yes, I don't think people are "pushing" their personal regimes - they are just applicable anecdotes.

I'm not complaining about the headline, I'm saying that people read far too far into them. The paper itself says that there is no causal link here, that the fact these people have decreased VitD is actually possible due to their [psychotic] behaviour, though without investigation, because that's not the aim of this paper. What I meant is that people who are so paranoid they can't get out of bed probably don't see much sunlight. Before admission. Exactly what the paper said, what you've repeated. I'm not sure what you don't understand here.

And yet the second-highest comment was talking about adding this to a guide about "hacking" mental health. HN has a hair trigger for digesting the fringes of scientific discovery and spinning it into quackery-fuelled hope for other sufferers.

I'm euphoric that this worked for you, once, but please don't use it as an argument that every comment on HN that advocates a supplement should be treated as anything more than the anecdote it is.

> This is NOT saying that low VitD causes psychiatric admission, just that patients may require supplements to bring them back to healthy levels.

Yes. This study is showing one aspect of physical healthcare that needs to be addressed when people are inpatients. Other factors include (but aren't limited to) smoking cessation, exercise, sexual health, skin integrity, medication review, and food.

Might be causal during pregnancy. There's a chance it's simply an expression of genetics as parents might be shut-ins but this sounds legit to my latching tendencies:

"Vitamin D is necessary for cell growth and communication in all organs in the body, so it’s no surprise that a lack of vitamin D has an affect on the developing brain"

https://qbi.uq.edu.au/article/2013/08/low-prenatal-vitamin-d...

> You get most of your vitamin D from skin exposure to sunlight

Is this even true? How are you going to get enough sunlight while living in, say, the US Northeast, or not being white?

In the UK you can easily get all your vitamin D from sunlight for 6 months of the year[0,1].

That said, more and more foods are being vitamin supplemented, or available in fortified versions, especially for children (eg milk, yoghurts). I doubt it'll become "standard" like thiamin and others in flour (in the UK at least) because you can overdose.

[0] http://www.bad.org.uk/for-the-public/skin-cancer/vitamin-d (footnotes 24, 25)

[1] https://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Summerhealth/Pages/vitamin-D-sun...

I recently read this paper. It says there was a major mathematical error in the meta study used to dictate the Vitamin D standards for many countries: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28768407/

If you're going to cite anything, cite the original letter, which was featured in a relatively high impact journal: http://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/6/10/4472

I've not had time to review it yet.

Having spoken with a mathematician, I'm not sure this letter's assumptions are entirely sound.

The major finding is the original targets are based on the average response (so up to 50% still in deficiency), not getting 97% to a base level.

However only being able to use 10 papers and without their data (only standard deviations) hamstrung their ability to peg a better range. More, their approach requires a normal distribution and a solid link between input and output levels, neither of which really exist here. Random error scuppers their analysis.

Again, this is not to say there isn't something here, it just needs more work, especially when recommending people take 2-3 times the current max tolerable limit.

"You" can, who is you?

> Population groups at particular risk of low vitamin D include pregnant and breastfeeding women, young children, older people, darker-skinned people, those who wear whole-body coverings or live in institutions. The Government currently recommends these groups take a 10 microgram (400 iu) vitamin D supplement a day (7 micrograms a day for children 6 months - 5 years)1,12.

So it seems like darker skinned people actually can't.

By following an Eskimo diet.

Another persective, which you just provided, is very healthy. I really need to see what you saw.

One way to see what he sees more often is, whenever you see something that sounds like causation, ask yourself whether it really is correlation - reverse the direction of implication, or consider if there might be a third reason that explains both.

CDNIC isn’t catchy enough. What’s a better shorthand for “Correlation does not imply causation”?

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