The trial was conducted at the Reina Sofía University Hospital in Córdoba, Spain. The trial included 76 patients with COVID-19 pneumonia. Although this is no longer the standard of care, all patients were treated with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and, when needed, a broad-spectrum antibiotic. Admission to the ICU was determined by a multidisciplinary committee consisting of intensive care specialists, pulmonologists, internal medicine specialists, and members of the ethics committee.
The patients were randomly allocated to receive or not receive vitamin D in a 2:1 ratio. This resulted in 50 patients in the vitamin D group and 26 patients in the control group.
Of 50 patients treated with calcifediol [a form of Vitamin D], one required admission to the ICU (2%), while of 26 untreated patients, 13 required admission (50%) p-value X^2 Fischer test p < 0.001. Univariate Risk Estimate Odds Ratio for ICU in patients with Calcifediol treatment versus without Calcifediol treatment: 0.02 (95%CI 0.002-0.17).
Expressed as relative risk, vitamin D reduced the risk of ICU admission 25-fold. Put another way, it eliminated 96% of the risk of ICU admission. Expressed as an odds ratio, which is a less intuitive concept but is often used in statistics because it gives an estimate of the effect of the treatment that would be constant across scenarios with different levels of risk, vitamin D reduced the odds of ICU admission by 98%. Either way, vitamin D practically abolished the need for ICU admission.
Would be great if this replicates in a bigger study. In the meantime, supplementing Vitamin D is cheap & safe.
In other covid news, we seem to be learning that Vitamin D supplementation is helpful.
A small RCT was recently published: Castillo et al. 2020
From Masterjohn’s commentary (a):
From the abstract:
Though perhaps the effect size they found is implausibly large...
Would be great if this replicates in a bigger study. In the meantime, supplementing Vitamin D is cheap & safe.
More Vitamin D discussion:
LessWrong post on Vitamin D supplementation (pre-covid)
SSC post on the Vitamin D literature (from 2014)
Gwern’s comment on that SSC post