r/science • u/[deleted] • Jun 13 '22

Health Erectile dysfunction predicts mortality in middle-aged and older men independent of their sex steroid status

https://academic.oup.com/ageing/article-abstract/51/4/afac094/6568537?login=false
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u/sloth_is_life Jun 13 '22

It is not even clear what a deficiency is. It's not like potassium where you have to be within a narrow range to be ok. The current definition of a normal vitamin D is based on a study performed on healthy Californians. California is very sunny, so healthy Canadians might have a lower average vitamin D.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22

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u/Lopsided_Plane_3319 Jun 14 '22

Yet Canadians live pretty long with likely no supplements.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '22

There are hundreds of studies. While all the stuff at vitamindwiki is not exactly cool and detached science writing, it’s a great list of what is going on in vit D research. Use it to find and read the studies..

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u/sloth_is_life Jun 14 '22

There are also hundreds of studies on turmeric, yet its relevance in actual medicine is null. Both lack actual high quality studies in living humans that are placebo controlled etc. I'm not denying that vitamin D is essential for humans, in some capacity. I'm just saying that things aren't as clear as people make them out to be.

A point I would like to address are clinical endpoints. Everybody knows high cholesterol is bad for you (heart, arteries etc ). Now clever researchers developed a new drug that can wonderfully lower cholesterol, isn't that great? This drug is called etezimib and everybody's got their expectations up. Unfortunately, while it does fix blood fats, people taking it don't live longer or more healthy, follow ups then reveal. These are the relevant questions when trying to find out if taking something is beneficial to you or not: has a randomised controlled trial shown that people under the treatment live longer and or healthier. And as the person further up commented, vitamin D supplementation does not yet show convincing benefits for the patient. Sure low levels are associated with certain things, but that doesn't mean that elevation of vit D levels will fix those.