| Title: | No evidence that vitamin D is able to prevent or affect the severity of COVID-19 in individuals with European ancestry: a Mendelian randomisation study of open data |
| Journal: | BMJ Nutrition Prevention & Health |
| Published: | 7 Jan 2021 |
| Pubmed: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34308111/ |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjnph-2020-000151 |
| URL: | https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/4/1/42.full.pdf |
Publication 5469
WARNING: the interactive features of this website use CSS3, which your browser does not support. To use the full features of this website, please update your browser.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Upper respiratory tract infections are reportedly more frequent and more severe in individuals with lower vitamin D levels. Based on these findings, it has been suggested that vitamin D can prevent or reduce the severity of COVID-19.METHODS: We used two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) to assess the causal effect of vitamin D levels on SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and COVID-19 severity using publicly available data. We also carried out a genome-wide association analysis (GWA) of vitamin D deficiency in the UK Biobank (UKB) and used these results and two-sample MR to assess the causal effect of vitamin D deficiency on SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and COVID-19 severity.
RESULTS: We found no evidence that vitamin D levels causally affect the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection (ln(OR)=0.17 (95% CI -0.22 to 0.57, p=0.39)) nor did we find evidence that vitamin D levels causally affect COVID-19 severity (ln(OR)=0.36 (95% CI -0.89 to 1.61, p=0.57)). Based on our GWA analysis, we found that 17 independent variants are associated with vitamin D deficiency in the UKB. Using these variants as instruments for our two-sample MR analyses, we found no evidence that vitamin D deficiency causally affects the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection (ln(OR)=-0.04 (95% CI -0.1 to 0.03, p=0.25)) nor did we find evidence that vitamin D deficiency causally affects COVID-19 severity (ln(OR)=-0.24 (95% CI -0.55 to 0.08, p=0.14)).
CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, we found no evidence that vitamin D is protective against SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 severity. Our data support the recent statement by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence that the use of vitamin D supplementation to mitigate COVID-19 is not supported by the available data.
2 Authors
- Hasnat A Amin
- Fotios Drenos
Enabling scientific discoveries that improve human health