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Vitamin D intake may not prevent depression or lift mood: JAMA study
Boston - Researchers have found in a largest ever studies of its kind that vitamin D supplementation does not protect against depression in middle-age or older adulthood . These findings do not support the use of vitamin D in adults to prevent depression.
The study was conducted to evaluate whether long-term supplementation with vitamin D prevent depression in the general adults population or not.
In this study, however, "There was no significant benefit from the supplement for this purpose. It did not prevent depression or improve mood," says Olivia I. Okereke, MD, MS, of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH's Psychiatry Department.
The study has been published in the journal of American Medical Association.
Okereke is the lead author of the report and principal investigator of this study, which . It included more than 18,000 men and women aged 50 years or older. Half the participants received vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) supplementation for an average of five years, and the other half received a matching placebo for the same duration.
Vitamin D is sometimes called the "sunshine vitamin" because the skin can naturally create it when exposed to sunlight. Numerous prior studies showed that low blood levels of vitamin D (25-hydroxy vitamin D) were associated with higher risk for depression in later life, but there have been few large-scale randomized trials necessary to determine causation. Now Okereke and her colleagues have delivered what may be the definitive answer to this question.
"One scientific issue is that you actually need a very large number of study participants to tell whether or not a treatment is helping to prevent development of depression," Okereke explains. "With nearly 20,000 people, our study was statistically powered to address this issue."
This study, called VITAL-DEP (Depression Endpoint Prevention in the Vitamin D and Omega-3 Trial), was an ancillary study to VITAL, a randomized clinical trial of cardiovascular disease and cancer prevention among nearly 26,000 people in the US.
From that group, Okereke and her colleagues studied the 18,353 men and women who did not already have any indication of clinical depression to start with, and then tested whether vitamin D3 prevented them from becoming depressed."
The results were clear. Among the 18,353 randomized participants, the researchers found the risk of depression or clinically relevant depressive symptoms was not significantly different between those receiving active vitamin D3 supplements and those on placebo, and there were no significant differences were seen between treatment groups in mood scores over time.
"It's not time to throw out your vitamin D yet though, at least not without your doctor's advice," says Okereke. Some people take it for reasons other than to elevate mood.
"Vitamin D is known to be essential for bone and metabolic health, but randomized trials have cast doubt on many of the other presumed benefits," said the paper's senior author, JoAnn Manson, MD, DrPH, at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
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Dr Kamal Kant Kohli-MBBS, DTCD- a chest specialist with more than 30 years of practice and a flair for writing clinical articles, Dr Kamal Kant Kohli joined Medical Dialogues as a Chief Editor of Medical News. Besides writing articles, as an editor, he proofreads and verifies all the medical content published on Medical Dialogues including those coming from journals, studies,medical conferences,guidelines etc. Email: drkohli@medicaldialogues.in. Contact no. 011-43720751