High Dose Vitamin D Cancer Treatment
Higher doses of vitamin D are associated with lower risks of cancer progression and mortality.
Deficiencies in B-group vitamins, vitamin C, iron, zinc, magnesium, and selenium have been linked with increased cancer risks.
Many observational studies on cancer patients have found vitamin D deficiency to also be a risk factor.
A 2016 report found that women whose vitamin D levels were raised above 40 ng/ml had a more than 65 percent lower risk of cancer incidence. Another 2019 study (JAMA) that followed end-term colon cancer patients found that those who increased their vitamin D levels experienced a slower worsening of their symptoms.
Grant’s research (Nutrients 2022) shows that vitamin D reduces the risk of cancer incidence by affecting differentiation, proliferation, and apoptosis (disintegration) of cells, prevents mortality by reducing the formation of new blood vessels to sustain tumor growth, and reduces metastasis.
Since vitamin D acts by blocking pathways that promote further cancer growth and metastasis, it is better at preventing cancer mortalities than cancer incidence, Grant said.
It is worth noting that cancer can be triggered by a multitude of factors including environmental toxins, smoking, radiation, genetics, and inflammation, many of which cannot be controlled by vitamin D intake alone.
Furthermore, it is still uncertain if vitamin D will be effective for all cancers, and the reason for cancer patients’ ailments vary from one to another.
Nonetheless, there have been case reports of cancer remission after taking high doses of vitamin D, though other factors may play into patients’ recovery.
Anesthesiologist Dr. Judson Sommerville said his patient’s wife was told by highly renowned cancer center MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, that she only had six months to live due to advanced ovarian cancer. She figured she had nothing to lose so she started taking high doses of vitamin D3 together with magnesium.
The patient’s wife started feeling better, and after a few months, she went to the doctor for a check-up. “They examined her and to their surprise, found her cancer-free,” Sommerville said. It has been almost 12 years and the cancer still hasn’t recurred.
Vitamin D may slow progression of metastatic colorectal cancer
Prompted by the “very encouraging” results of the Sunshine clinical trial, the potential benefits of vitamin D supplementation in metastatic colorectal cancer will be evaluated in a larger clinical trial planned to open at several hundred sites across the U.S. in 2019, said Kimmie Ng, director of clinical research in Dana-Farber’s Gastrointestinal Cancer Center, and corresponding author of the Sunshine study. “To our knowledge, this study is the first completed randomized clinical trial of vitamin D supplementation for treatment of advanced or metastatic colorectal cancer,” Ng said.
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| A container of vitamin D capsules. (Mark Lennihan/AP Photo) |
“The results of our trial suggest an improved outcome for patients who received vitamin D supplementation, and we look forward to launching a larger trial to confirm these exciting and provocative findings,” said Charles Fuchs, formerly of Dana-Farber and now director of Yale Cancer Center, the senior author of the study.
The initial findings were reported at the 2017 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Those results, along with additional data, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (2019).
The Sunshine trial randomized 139 patients with previously untreated metastatic colorectal cancer. One group took pills containing 4,000 international units (IU) of vitamin D per day along with standard chemotherapy, while the other group took 400 units (about the dose found in a multivitamin) along with chemotherapy.
Vitamin D, which is necessary for bone health, is made in the body through a chemical reaction dependent on sun exposure and is contained in some foods. In laboratory studies, vitamin D has demonstrated anti-cancer properties such as triggering programmed cell death, inhibiting cancer cell growth, and reducing metastatic potential. Prospective observational studies have linked higher blood levels of vitamin D with lower risk of colorectal cancer and improved survival of patients with the disease, but those studies could not prove that vitamin D was the cause.
Against this backdrop, the randomized, prospective phase 2 Sunshine trial recruited patients at 11 academic and community centers across the U.S. to test whether vitamin D supplementation can improve outcomes in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. All patients received standard chemotherapy. Patients in the high-dose vitamin D group initially took 8,000 IU a day for 14 days, then 4,000 IU a day thereafter. The low or standard-dose vitamin D group took 400 IU daily during all cycles. All patients were asked not to take any other vitamin D or calcium supplements during the trial period.
The trial’s primary outcome measure was progression-free survival — the time until the disease began to worsen, or death — and it was longer in the high-dose group. Another measure that was calculated, the hazard ratio for disease progression or death, revealed 36 percent lower odds in the high-dose group.
The researchers also sampled patients’ blood to measure changes in the levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D], which is a standard test to determine a person’s vitamin D status. This test showed that only 9 percent of the patients in the clinical trial had sufficient vitamin D at the beginning of treatment. Over the course of the study, patients receiving low doses of the supplement had no substantial change in their vitamin D levels, while those in the high-dose group soon reached the vitamin D-sufficient range and maintained it.
Analysis of the results showed less benefit from high-dose vitamin D in patients who were obese, and those whose tumors contained a mutated KRAS gene, suggesting “that certain subsets of patients may need even higher doses of vitamin D for anti-tumor activity,” the researchers said. They cautioned, however, that high doses of vitamin D shouldn’t be taken except within the context of a clinical trial.
The study and its findings are “extremely important,” Ng said, because “it identifies a cost-effective, safe, and easily accessible agent as a potential new treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer. This could therefore potentially have a large and wide-reaching impact globally, regardless of a patient’s socioeconomic status or a country’s resources.”
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