Comment by nayroclade 3 days ago
The meta-analysis cited in the article is from 2024 and specifically mentions the Shaffer et al. 2014 review cited by Wikipedia as being low quality:
> Some of the available reviews, owing to the limited number of trials and methodological biases, were of low quality (Anglin et al., 2013; Cheng et al., 2020; Li et al., 2014; Shaffer et al., 2014).
Until you see an article like this which calls for '5000 mg' of supplementation, decide that you didn't take enough and overdose...
HN and dubious self-medication advice go hand-in-hand. Please consult a medical professional instead of a bunch of ad-tech devs.
Remember when HN had an entire year of articles about how we should all be on microdoses of various hallucinogenic and psychoactive substances for "peak performance"?
Good times.
HN is as bad at medicine as it is at everything else.
No, I was here just for the year in which they ended COVID with vitamin D. With the weekly (n=5) articles garnered with blog posts from randos swearing by it...
If you're not in the respective fields it can be pretty difficult to distinguish good from bad research. I am not able to do so.
If you (or your close ones) don't suffer from depression, then I guess it's best to ignore it until scientific consensus has formed. That will for sure show up on wikipedia. As far as I can see as a layperson there is a lot of correlation with Vitamin D that breaks down in interventions and Vitamin D is recommended mostly for babies and elderly people. On the other hand I see Vitamin D pushed as a miracle drug not unlike Vitamin C used to some decades ago and regular reports of overdosing of supplements leading to organ failure.
If you're suffering from depression, you should talk to your doctor. They will be able to help you to weigh potential benefits with risks
Therefore what to do? I have seen these Hacker News vitamin D ads appear every few months for the past 15 years, or so. I always seem to have a vitamin D deficiency, so it reminds me to take supplements. I take them for a few months, hoping to see a change, but I don't feel any benefit. Then, I forget to take the supplements until the next time I see an ad. How to know if they're actually doing something useful?