Editorials
Vitamin D and risk of type 2 diabetes
BMJ 2022; 377 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.o1166 (Published 25 May 2022) Cite this as: BMJ 2022;377:o1166Linked Research
Effect of active vitamin D treatment on development of type 2 diabetes
Re: Vitamin D-ance plague continues
Dear Editor,
When you read medical and public health journals regularly, you may find enormous increases in the number of non-intervention studies and trials related to vitamin D. With the help of MEDLINE, we see that the proportion of articles with 'vitamin d' in the title increased from 0.05% in the 1990s to 0.18% in the 2010s. A depressing majority of trials did not find any sizeable effect. Despite that, publications are ongoing, and even appear on the good pages of The BMJ.
Authors of the reports with negative results may speculate that the result may be positive if you use vitamin D in this or that subgroup, or if you complement vitamin D with another intervention. As in the case of the medieval dance plague, the cause of the epidemic of the Vitamin D trials for hundreds of indications is not clear. But any way, let's pass these reports to where they belong - to the back yard of the literature on food additives.
Competing interests: No competing interests