Irish scientists prove Vitamin D levels linked to depression (opens in new tab)

(irishcentral.com)

29 pointsFlott7y ago6 comments

6 comments

"scientists prove"

Somebody needs to read some Kuhn :-P

Vitamin D deficiency correlates strongly with time spent sitting around indoors. They control for physical activity, but not for time spent indoors as far as I can tell from the linked article. Separating time indoors from vitamin D levels would seem to be a tricky endeavor, so it's understandable that that's left uncontrolled.

A vitamin D-depression connection would make some sense. Given that humans largely evolved spending much more time outdoors than modern humans, deleterious effects of indoor life would not be surprising. +75% sounds like an extremely strong effect size deserving of some skepticism.

The original source: https://tilda.tcd.ie/news-events/2018/1813-vitd-depression/

mygo7y ago

I studied vertebrate physiology in college and Vitamin D is a bit of a misnomer, because it’s not really a vitamin, it acts as a hormone. And although Vitamin D is known as the “sunshine vitamin”, you can get it as a supplement. There’s no telling how many people in the study took it as a supplement vs getting it naturally from the sun. But a vitamin D deficiency is a hormonal deficiency. Whether or not they got their hormonal balance from the sun or from a supplement shouldn’t matter so much. And being a hormone, its deficiency can have different symptoms for different people. Depression is a common one.

You can take a vitamin D supplement and stay indoors or otherwise keep your routine and still receive the hormonal benefits if you are deficient.

ionised7y ago

I thought supplements were generally considered a scam, as our bodies won't/can't absorb vitamins in that form, we need to absorb them from food or sunlight.

2 more replies

SpikeDad7y ago

I'm always skeptical when ground breaking research is only discussed in one specific journal, commented on only people who participated in the study or work for the journal and all who are vested in a specific country where the study was performed.

There really needs to be a lot more discussion over the specific scientific realms with lots more independent commentary on the study and results.

And as comes up frequently in human psychological issues repeatability is the gold standard and there isn't any in this specific case.

And humans and their behaviors are so complicated and so difficult to quantify that it seems so unlikely that one specific substance would be a "miracle cure" for human depression.

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