Vitamin D has mixed effects on cancer, broken bones

NEW YORK: Extra vitamin D and calcium may offer some protection against fractures in elderly people, but have little or no impact on cancer risk, according to a fresh look at the medical evidence.

Some research has suggested that vitamin D, with or without calcium, might help stave off cancer, but recent trials have slashed those hopes.

"It turns out that as a group, all of the micronutrient supplements have been disappointing," said Dr. Michael Pollak, who heads the division of cancer prevention at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and was not involved in the new work.

"Even one of the best candidates, which is vitamin D, is certainly no slam dunk," he told Reuters Health.

The new report, out Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was commissioned by the government-backed U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to inform its public recommendations.

It pulls together 19 gold standard experiments -- so-called randomized controlled trials -- on vitamin D with or without calcium. The trials lasted anywhere from seven months to seven years and ranged in size from a few thousand participants to tens of thousands.

Only three of them reported on cancer, however. While one small study found some protection against cancer in postmenopausal women taking vitamin D and calcium, the larger studies found no benefits.

"I don't have confidence in any of the findings because they could be chance findings," lead researcher Mei Chung, of Tufts Medical Center in Boston, told Reuters Health.

Last month, another randomized controlled trial was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Although it wasn't included in Chung's report, it confirms her results.

In that study, among seniors taking 800 IU of vitamin D daily for a few years, 32 out of every 100 died during the study, while 33 out of every 100 people who did not get the supplement died.

That small difference could easily have been due to chance, the researchers found. There were no differences in deaths from cancer or heart disease either, just as calcium also proved unhelpful.

According to Chung, one large U.S. study, known as the Women's Health Initiative, also showed that women taking the supplements had higher rates of kidney and bladder stones.

Marji McCullough, a nutritional scientist at the American Cancer Society, said her organization does not advise dietary supplements to prevent cancer.

"Various researchers have recommended that, but large consensus panels have not," she told Reuters Health. "There is no compelling evidence currently that taking supplements will lower your cancer risk."

The Institute of Medicine recommends that most adults get 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams (mg) of calcium per day and 600 to 800 IU of vitamin D. It sets a recommended upper limit at 2,000 mg of calcium and 4,000 IU of vitamin D.

However, Chung's team did find a small reduction in fracture risk among elderly people living in an institution such as a nursing home, with extra vitamin D and calcium preventing two out of every 100 expected fractures.

But the risk reduction was smaller for people living on their own, and might have been due to chance, she added.

Chung, who is assistant director of the Evidence-based Practice Center at Tufts, said that in an earlier report from 2009, which looked at several possible health benefits, only the fracture benefit was convincing.

Pollak said it's possible that a few people who have low levels of vitamin D may get some benefit from it, but that doesn't warrant everybody taking extra vitamins.

"You can have too much of a good thing," he told Reuters Health.

For people interested in lowering their cancer risk, he added, there are better ways to go than supplements.

"Don't smoke and stay as close as you can to your ideal body weight," Pollak urged. "Those two things will definitely lower you cancer risk and they will have many other health benefits as well -- and there are no possible downsides."

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force could not say when its new vitamin D guidelines will be released. (Reuters)

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Hong Kong school closed in bird flu scare

HONG KONG: A Hong Kong school was closed on Friday after a dead bird found in the southern Chinese city was tested positive for the deadly H5 strain of the bird flu virus, health officials said.

The closure came after the school clerk, a 48-year-old woman, picked up the sick black-headed gull at the school on Tuesday, which died the next day and was tested positive for the H5 strain, a health department spokesman told.

She picked up the bird -- a common winter visitor -- without any protection and developed a fever, sore throat and diarrhoea but has tested negative for Influenza A (H5), a variant of bird flu.

"She has been cleared in the medical results we received today but tests on her 11-year-old son are still ongoing, with results expected to be released later Friday," said the spokesman.

The secondary school in the rural New Territories, close to the border with mainland China, is closed for an unspecified time for disinfection and while the department traces people who may have had contact with the bird.

Hong Kong was the site of the world's first major outbreak of bird flu among humans in 1997, when six people died from a mutated form of the virus, which is normally confined to poultry. Millions of birds were then culled.

A 59-year-old woman tested positive for bird flu in 2010 in Hong Kong's first human case of the illness since 2003.

The city is particularly nervous about infectious diseases after an outbreak of deadly respiratory disease SARS in 2003 killed 300 people in Hong Kong and a further 500 worldwide. (AFP)

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Saving Lives: Healthline to Debut Drug Notebook Social Platform

Want to know if anyone else has had an adverse reaction to a medication? If other consumers have side effects similar to your own? Healthline’s new Drug Notebook just may be the website to help you find answers.

Finding out more about your medication, as well as the experiences of others using the same prescriptions, just got easier with Healthline’s new Drug Notebook social platform. No longer will you need to rely solely on your pharmacist or prescription flyer side effect information. Now you can compare notes with thousands of others to find out drug interactions, side effects, helpful instructions, and more.

Healthline, one of the fastest growing online health services, is announcing today that they have formed a partnership with First Life Research, a social media search company, to add Social Search to the Healthline Drug Notebook, a suite of drug information applications that includes Drug Interaction Checker, Pill Identifier, Drug Comparison, and more.

Healthline is a consumer site that reaches over 100 million consumers each month in partnership with Yahoo, AARP, and Aetna, among others. In addition to providing information on the latest research in medicine, Healthline offers Health Learning Centers, a disease information database (Disease A – Z), a symptom checker (Symptoms A – Z), 3D Body Maps, videos and slideshows,

To add to their already burgeoning databases, they are adding a much improved user experience by integrating social media into their Drug Notebook. Healthline’s Social Search, which will employ First Life’s Treato platform, will map more than a billion posts from health forums and blogs around the web.

This new tool will cover more than 11,000 drug brands, providing multiple perspectives and insights into drug information that consumers want—and need—to know. Consumers can filter conversations by popular topics, related drugs and interact with graphical summaries to view the most popular topics and drill down into specific threads.

By clicking on the “See What Others are Saying” links throughout the Drug Notebook, consumers can search social media and forum discussions about the medications they take and compare conversations about side effects, therapy switching, interactions with other medications, costs and effectiveness.

“Health care is inherently social, and technology that builds from social connections, and encourages collaboration and conversation will lead to a better patient experience and improved outcomes,” said West Shell, III, Chairman and CEO, Healthline Networks. “Drug information is one of the top treatment topics consumers search for—this new social search we created with the Treato platform will allow consumers to better understand their medications, as well as other choices, side effects and effectiveness straight from current user conversations.”

The Drug Notebook social platform will provide detailed information on specific medications including:

Easy Navigation: Each drug has its own Drug Notebook home page that provides quick information and links to available social data

Comprehensive Search: A broad list of available data to search, including side effects, interactions, safety alerts, clinical information, commentary from other consumers using the drug and images

Find Common Drug Names: The top 10 brand and generic names used for the drug will be listed for consumers to easily identify the medications for which they are seeking more information

Narrow Searches via Topic filters: Ability to filter by topic area on each specific drug, allowing users to easily narrow their search

Visual, Graphical summaries: Illustrations showing the most popular topics associated with the drug, frequency of posts on a specific topic and more

Sharing Options with Social Media Tools: Links for users to share any Healthline Social Search content.

In the future, the insights from Healthline’s Social Search powered by Treato will be expanded and integrated into Healthline’s full suite of search tools and condition-specific learning centers.

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