IMPORTANT ALERT: Blood Pressure Medication and Lip Cancer

This is a special alert for patients taking blood pressure medications such as hydrochlorothiazide (a diuretic) and Nifedipine (calcium channel blockers).  According to a new observational study, both of these drug classes appear to increase a patient's hypersensitivity to sunlight. The study shows a link between these medications and the development of squamous cell skin cancer of the lips. It is believed that the combination of increased sun sensitivity and sun exposure is the culprit.

DO NOT stop taking these medications without the advice of a doctor. However, if you are on these medications, please limit your sun exposure. If you limit your sun exposure, you will unfortunately increase your risk of a Vitamin D deficiency. Therefore, please make sure to get more Vitamin D in your diet from sea kelp, sea vegetables, wild salmon, and vitamin D fortified foods.

Something To Laugh About and More On Vitamin D

It's often been said that laughter is the best medicine, and I couldn't agree more. Therefore, I dedicate today's blog to a funny video that a friend shared with me and my wife. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PypsMk_0QxY&feature=youtube_gdata_player

For those hungry for some science, here's a funny, not in terms of humor, but in terms of being a somewhat ridiculous study that was reported on a few days ago. I have no doubt that the results of the study are already being used to feed the recent hysteria about Vitamin D deficiencies.

Why? I'll get to that in a moment but let me first share what happened with an email I received from a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health that reported on this new study.

Last week, I took exception to material in another article from the same source that implied that calcium could only be obtained from dairy products, which is far from the truth. Here's a link to another government resource listing many other food sources, albeit not all healthy ones. And while dairy products dominate the list, there are other excellent sources as well. Cut and paste: http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Calcium-HealthProfessional/

When I wrote to the source of the email, the response was that they simply reported what they received from the newswires. I told them that such a response was a cop-out and that they had a responsibility as a government service to make sure that the information they were disseminating was accurate. We went back and forth in a few emails and the net result was that I received an email from the head librarian in which he essentially disavowed any responsibility for the information being forwarded. I found that quite disappointing.

Nevertheless, I knew that henceforth I have to be careful with anything I received from this source. With that in mind, let’s address the headline of the article in a recent email I received from the same source, which was titled, “Low Vitamin D Levels Linked To Weight Gain in Older Women.” Now any reasonable person would conclude based on this headline that women with Vitamin D deficiencies are generally gaining weight as a result of their deficiency. Well, that’s not what the studied showed.

Quoting from the email, “The researchers followed more than 4,600 women aged 65 and older over the course of nearly five years. The study found the women with low levels of vitamin D gained about two more pounds during that time than those with normal levels of the vitamin.” How about that? A whole two pounds more. Is that consistent with what you expected from the headline? Two whole pounds gained over 5 years? I’m sure we all expected that from the headline, right? That’s not all. Which women do you think gained the weight? It turns out to quote the article again, it was the “women [who] generally weighed several pounds more to begin with, the researchers noted.” So the heavier women gained more weight. Not a big surprise that an overweight person would gain more weight as is often the case.

But that’s not the funny part I referenced earlier.

Here’s the funny, or not so funny, part. The article goes on to say, “Although most of the women in the study were not trying to lose weight, over the course of the study 27 percent of the women lost more than 5 percent of their body weight and 12 percent gained more than 5 percent of their body weight, the researchers noted.”So despite the vitamin D deficiency or perhaps because of it, which apparently according to this study was present in 78% of the tested women, more women actually LOST weight than gained it.

Accordingly, why wasn’t the headline “Low Vitamin D Levels Linked To Weight Loss in Older Women” or even “Low Vitamin D Levels Linked To Weight Gain, Weight Loss, and No Weight Change in Older Women.” Now that would have been an accurate headline.

So was the article a total loss? No. Here’s the only semi-reasonable comment coming from the article and I quote, “"Our study only shows an association between insufficient levels of vitamin D and weight gain," study author Dr. Erin LeBlanc, an endocrinologist and researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Oregon said. "We would need to do more studies before recommending the supplements to keep people from gaining weight. Since there are so many conflicting recommendations about taking vitamin D for any reason, it's best if patients get advice from their own health care provider."

Finally, a little bit of sense although given the 27% of women actually lost weight it would be more logical to suggest that Vitamin D supplementation should NEVER be used as a weight loss tool.

So as I often recommend, please don’t trust headlines, even from government sources. You need to, at a minimum, read the entire article and ideally, look at the actual study if you want to even get close to the truth. Of course, even looking at the study is not a safe bet because so many studies are done by unreliable sources with an agenda, who manipulate the science, if it even is actual science, in their favor.

So what’s a person to do? Send the article or study it to me. I love to look at interesting studies and dissect them looking for the truth. Consider me your personal truth seeker.

Vitamin D Benefits Still Inconclusive

http://mdprevent.blogspot.com/2012/03/whats-big-deal-about-vitamin-d-lot.html


On Tuesday March 20, 2012 I wrote a blog (link above) about Vitamin D. Vitamin D, like other vitamins, is an essential part of human functioning. Over the past couple of years its value has been so overblown that many supplement marketers have advocated mega-dosing with it. Many of my first-time patients present with multiple forms of Vitamin D which they have added over the years, which they don't seem to need.

In 2010, the Institute of Medicine explicitly warned against mega-dosing with Vitamin D, but the message apparently never got out to the general public probably because the marketers are very successful in out-shouting reliable medical sources most of the time.

So here's my attempt to get the latest news out. The Endocrine Society, the world's oldest, largest, and most active organization devoted to research on hormones and the clinical practice of endocrinology, put together a task force to look at Vitamin D and basically concluded that "large randomized trials are needed to determine whether vitamin D can prevent or treat cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other non-skeletal disorders."


The task force examined more than 300 studies of vitamin D's role in tissues other than bone and published their report as an official "scientific statement" in the June issue of Endocrine Reviews.

The task force's most important conclusion was that although many of the studies offered tantalizing hints that the substance helps maintain health in a variety of ways, there remains "little hard proof."

So there you have it. You don't need to supplement with Vitamin D in the absence of a known deficiency, but if you insist, take into consideration the amounts of Vitamin D you get from sunlight (15-20 minutes a day typically reported to produce the recommended daily allowance), wild salmon (2-3 times recommended amounts), Almond milk, regular milk and other dairy products, etc. and adjust accordingly to avoid mega-dosing.

Please share this with your friends so that everyone has the facts and aren't ruled by the fiction.

An educated patient is my favorite type.