The Massachusetts Medical Society chooses the most important medical topics each year. Last month, you heard the two most important medical topics from the year 2018. This month, you will hear the next two topics.
The first medical news today: Vitamin D is important for bone health, but in our daily diet, vitamin D is virtually non-existent. Our skin, however, automatically makes vitamin D with the help of sunlight. If you regularly go for a walk outdoors, it should be enough. Some, however, warn that vitamin D deficiency is common. Taking a high-dose vitamin D tablet every day would strengthen your immune system and lead to fewer heart attacks, strokes, cancer, infections and multiple sclerosis. This idea was very thoroughly tested in 2018 in the clinical study VITAL. Nearly 26 thousand men and women were randomised into two groups. One group took a placebo tablet every day. The other group took a high-dose vitamin D tablet every day. The dose was high-dose indeed: 2000 international units of vitamin D3 daily. This dose is much higher than is otherwise standard in conventional medicine, meaning that the clinical study VITAL especially took into consideration the reports about the possible protective effects of high-dose vitamin D. Still, the result is: After an average follow-up of 5.3 years, there were almost identical frequencies of heart attacks and strokes as well as cancer in the two groups. These are sobering results. Vitamin D is supposed to protect you in an almost a miraculous way. However, taking vitamin D tablets every day, whether high-dose or not, unfortunately will not protect you.
The second medical news today: Researchers compared bacteria collected 20 years apart in hospitals. The bacteria that were collected in hospitals after 2010 were ten-times more resistant to hand wash alcohols as the bacteria collected 20 years earlier. The researchers who did find out this fact warn that hand wash alcohols perhaps will no longer work in the future.