Vitamin D Supplementation in Critically Ill Patients

I am constantly reading and educating myself in an attempt to gain whatever edge I possibly can for my patients. Their survival and quality of life is what I have personally dedicated my life to. Being someone who is following along on my journey, I can safely assume you're doing the same. I have become quite fond of metabolic resuscitation, using Vitamin C, thiamine, and stress dose steroids, with the Paul Marik data and have been utilizing it in my practice for several years. No harm, cheap drugs, let's do it! I've seen some great results from it but I also would like to see some better data (hopefully next month!).

That being said, this is a brand new article published in the NEJM on December 11th of this year. I can't say I was excited about the prospects of this article, but all in all I was hoping it would help. Unfortunately, it does not. Sigh.

This was a well done study with a high aspiration of enrolling 3000 patients. Unfortunately, they did not get there. They stopped the study early because of futility. I don't know if the researchers let out a sigh of relief at that point that their study was complete, or if they were defeated because they wanted to see a positive outcome. Who knows. Overall I am glad that we have an answer for this question and would like to give a hat tip to everyone who participated in this study.

-EJ



Link to Abstract

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute PETAL Clinical Trials Network, Ginde AA, Brower RG, et al. Early High-Dose Vitamin D3for Critically Ill, Vitamin D-Deficient Patients. N Engl J Med. 2019;381(26):2529–2540. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1911124

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