Can vitamin D supplementation improve treatment outcomes in patients subjected to anti-cancer immunotherapy?

Poland: A recent study has suggested that maintaining normal vitamin D levels while receiving immunotherapy medications called immune checkpoint inhibitors may be important for patients with advanced skin cancer and should be considered a standard procedure to improve treatment outcomes.

The findings are published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

Vitamin D has many effects on the body, including immune system regulation. To see whether vitamin D levels might impact the effectiveness of immune checkpoint inhibitors, investigators analyzed the blood of 200 patients with advanced melanoma before and every 12 weeks during immunotherapy treatment.

A favourable response rate to immune checkpoint inhibitors was observed in 56.0% of patients with normal baseline vitamin D levels or normal levels obtained with vitamin D supplementation, compared with 36.2% in the group with low vitamin D levels without supplementation. Progression‐free survival—the time from treatment initiation until cancer progression in these groups was 11.25 and 5.75 months, respectively. 

“Of course, vitamin D is not itself an anti-cancer drug, but its normal serum level is needed for the proper functioning of the immune system, including the response that anti-cancer drugs like immune checkpoint inhibitors affect,” said lead author Łukasz Galus, MD, of Poznan University of Medical Sciences, in Poland. “In our opinion, after appropriately randomized confirmation of our results, the assessment of vitamin D levels and its supplementation could be considered in managing melanoma.”

Reference:

Łukasz Galus, Michał Michalak, Mateusz Lorenz, Renata Stoińska-Swiniarek, Daria Tusień Małecka, Agnieszka Galus, Tomasz Kolenda, Ewa Leporowska, Jacek Mackiewicz, Published: 24 April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/cncr.34718.