Mega D

jimmylegs · Family Elder Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 1786

In my continuing spirit of self-guinea-pigdom, I am trying a short burst of big time vitamin D3. This is in order to boost my serum levels up to around 125-150 nmol/l (the level recommended by one of my doctors, who also has MS).

I figured out from the literature, that it was going to take 5 months to get where I am supposed to be, if I stayed on my recent average 4400IU daily.

So, I found out from the drug info centre, how much to take to get a quick jump up about 50 nmol/l. They said they do 50,000IU per day for 10 days, but would usually use that on people that were seriously deficient.

My last level was 72 nmol/l which is only a little bit under the good zone for bone health. Some would argue it is way low for immune system health. So, I am not worried by jumping up another 50 nmol by next week.

I went to my family doc and asked for a prescription for 50000iu for 10 days and 4000 iu per day daily maintenance thereafter.

She said okay but also gave me a lab requisition for baseline testing prior to starting the big dose, another lab req for right after the big doses are over, and a third req for 2 weeks after to see if we're on the right track re: maintenance at 4000 IU/d.

My doc's computer system says that serum D3 levels over 250 are toxic, but I relayed the story about the south indian workers with unsupplemented natural levels over 450. I also mentioned that I had a reference from my dietitian that listed a study where 50000IU taken daily for a month resulted in serum levels of 320, so 10 days should be safe in my case, and won't even get near her 250 limit anyway.

So the pharmacy i went to has a compounding license and he had ordered me the smoking highly concentrated D3 after a discussion we had last week. It's 1,000,000IU/gm. So I take 1/20th of a gm per day for 10 days. Instead of having to take 50 d3 pills each day for 10 days, I get to have about 2 drops of this liquid from a graduated oral syringe. SA-WEEEET! so much better than pills!

so, i get the baseline D result back probably on Monday, and will keep u all posted as to the improvement in my levels, and hopefully general condition and symptoms.

ttfn!

CureOrBust · Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 4:11 am Post subject:

love to read guinea pigs stories. good luck, and cant wait to hear you're results/effects.

jimmylegs · Family Elder Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 1786

thanks!

CureOrBust · Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 5:12 am Post subject:

I have noticed you have done a LOT of reading on D3, but the following is some things to maybe watch out for in the long term (in case others are thinnking there are NO possible side effects). I found this at a sale sit (http://www.anyvitamins.com/vitamin-d-info.htm)

jimmylegs · Family Elder Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 1786

yes there are certainly implications for too much vitamin D. i am afraid that the warnings about overuse of this vitamin prevent people from getting anywhere near enough, as opposed to getting too much. i have a page from a book that was given to me by my dietitian, that shows a level of serum cholecalciferol of 320 nmol/l was obtained through taking 50,000 IU per day for four weeks. again i reference the south indian outdoor labourers whose unsupplemented levels were over 450.

anyway here's what wikipedia has to say about the dangers of vitamin D:

Oral overdose of vitamin D3

Overdose is extremely rare; in fact, mild deficiencies are far more common.

While the sunshine-generated quantity is self-limiting, vitamin pills were thought not to be; and this has led to widespread concern, which may well be misplaced.

In practice, the human body has enormous storage capacity for vitamin D, and in any case all common foods and correctly-formulated vitamin pills contain far too little for overdose to ever occur in normal circumstances and normal doses.[citation needed] Indeed, Stoss therapy involves taking a dose over a thousand times the daily RDA once every few months, and even then often fails to normalise vitamin D3 levels in the body.[citation needed]

However, oral overdose has been recorded due to manufacturing and industrial accidents and leads to hypercalcaemia and atherosclerosis and ultimately death.

The exact long-term safe dose is not entirely known, but intakes of up to 2000 IU (10x the RDA) are believed to be safe, and some researchers believe that 10,000 IU does not lead to long term overdose. It seems that there are chemical processes that destroy excess vitamin D, even when taken orally, although these processes have not been identified (in experiments blood levels of vitamin D do not continue to increase over many months at these doses as presumably would be needed for toxicity to occur.)

Note that although normal food and pill vitamin D concentration levels are too low to be toxic, cod-liver oil, if taken in multiples of the normal dose, could reach poisonous levels because of the high vitamin A content in cod-liver oil -- not the vitamin D.

jimmylegs · Family Elder Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 1786

BTW i think 4000 IU per day is perfect for maintenance once you're at the level you want. that's what i will take once i'm done my 10 days at 50,000IU per day.

CureOrBust · Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 4:49 am Post subject:

Have you looked into using a sun bed to try to induce higher vitamin D serum levels?

I am sure i have read of this technique somewhere, a long time ago.

I did a search and found this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15585781&dopt=Abstract

Which says

jimmylegs · Family Elder Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 1786

hi, thanks for that Smile

i had read that uvb rays were required to initiate the cutaneous production of cholecalciferol, and i may also have read the study you quoted in the past. i had a look at the abstract and noted that the beds used in the study were uvb beds.

when i looked into regular tanning salons, i found they were uva beds. this is because uvb are viewed as the more harmful. they penetrate more deeply. anyway, i knew the tanning salon would not do the trick.

i did find a supplier of uvb beds and priced used ones at around $2000 CDN. but i'm putting that off for the time being to see if the $50 concentrated liquid works Wink

so far i remain pretty determined not to cost my government $22,000 dollars per year. i've always been less than impressed with pfizer and made up my own slogan for them: "we put the HARM in pharmaceuticals!" i want to put off doing the rebif thing for as long as i can get away with.

if all else fails i will just have to move back to vancouver and hang out on the nudie beach all day! lol! omg the stairs to get to that thing, i'll never be seen again hee hee hee!

Kasuku · Getting to Know You... Joined: Nov 12, 2004 Posts: 18

I have read that a 10 to 15 minutes 3 times a week exposure to the sunlight is sufficient in providing high level of vitamin D. However, there is no mention of amount of skin exposure (head only, head and arms, legs or whole body) and the UV index which is determined by the sun angle when the rays hit earth (summer vs winter, morning/miday/afternoon) and latitude. I also read that the darker is your skin the longer you need to expose it to sunlight. So this 10 to 15 minutes as a rule of thumb seem very imprecise. Do you know of a chart that takes these variables into the equation for the amount of time a person should get exposure to sunlight? In another word what is a minimum time of exposure during the summer and during the winter?

Kasuku

jimmylegs · Family Elder Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 1786

k, you have hit the nail on the head! it's an annoyingly complicated bit of research to undertake!

not only is the colour of your skin a variable, but your age, since an older body is less efficient at hydroxylating vitamin D into calcitriol. i guess this explains florida to an extent!

i've heard the 10 to 15 minutes three times a week figures also. i believe for body parts that's face neck and hands, or you can do hands and arms instead, something like that. i am not keen on the word "sufficient", however. do they mean sufficient to avert rickets [edit jan 14 2008: not rickets but osteoporosis and osteomalacia - rickets prevention is down around 50 level] (80 nmol/l)? because the research is starting to show that is not going to cut it - for immune system health, it has to be more.

i read a study that in edmonton, alberta, canada they could get enough sunlight between around april and september, and in another, that bostonians get enough between around march and october. i have also read that your serum levels of d fluctuate on a cycle that is offset from your actual exposure. for example a bostonian nudist might run inside for the winter on november 1st, but have their serum vitamin D levels peak at new year's. i'm only throwing out dates as an example only - don't recall the exact dates from that study. ***update - the lag is four months***

what that means to me is, by the time i'd be comfortable exposing expanses of bare skin outside, in may or so, that the sun is going to be strong enough to do the job. nature is amazing, ain't it? and i'm totally comfortable getting my sun in the middle of the day, 10 minutes front, 10 minutes back. where i live, that's not enough to burn. (actually i just did 20 front and 20 back today at 1pm, no problem - barely had time to break a sweat).

on to the calculator. all i've come across so far is one that by the looks of it is only going to estimate how much solar energy is being delivered to the surface for a given location. it does not help you figure out time variations based on age or skin colouring. here's the energy/location calculator: http://nadir.nilu.no/~olaeng/fastrt/VitD-ez.html

so, whether young or old or dark or light, i suggest that one answer is monitoring your serum levels of vitamin D via the lab, perhaps getting 4 tests for the first year, to see how the levels fluctuate seasonally, and then settling into maybe an annual early spring check thereafter, to get a sense of the 'worst case scenario' each year. also you might find that you don't like where you're at on the scale after the first test, and would consider taking extra supplements to get into a healthy range, and then monitoring the annual cycle thereafter.

the reason it is important to have serum cholecalciferol (prehormone "vitamin" d) levels appropriately high is so that your liver and kidney can hydroxylate it into calcitriol which is a HORMONE required for REGULATION of the immune system.

i am not a doctor, this is just info i have synthesized from a whackload of reading up on vitamin D research. if anyone wants to read more, i have posted many journal references in other strings, just search for me as author and look for vitamin D titles in the results...

Kasuku · Getting to Know You... Joined: Nov 12, 2004 Posts: 18

Thank you Jimmylegs for your informative response. I have another question if you don't mind. Do you know how vitamin D helps the immune system? I assume that the action is more by immuno-modulation than immuno-suppression. Is it via Th2 vs Th1 response? or anti-inflammatory vs pro-inflammatory cytokines? or up-regulation vs down-regulation of immune cells?
Is vitamin D also recommended for other auto-immune diseases, like lupus, RA, etc.? Sorry this is more than one question.
K

jimmylegs · Family Elder Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 1786

vitamin d status is correlated with incidence of rheumatoid arthritis, alzheimers, various cancers, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and more i can't think of right this second.

once cholecalciferol has been hydroxylated once (by the liver) it is called calcidiol (25 hydroxyvitamin D3) and after a second hydroxylation in the kidney it is called calcitriol (1,25 dihydroxyvitamin D3).

calcitriol is produced by the immune system when it needs to put the brakes on a response. so yes it is immunomodulatory. it does not "suppress" immune responses, it tells them when enough is enough.

i have to run out to a meeting but i will find some of my other posts on this when i get back tonight. or you can scout around the forums here to see if you can find a previous post of mine about it.

ttfn!

Kasuku · Getting to Know You... Joined: Nov 12, 2004 Posts: 18

Please do not spend time searching the posts, I can do that. You have been kind enough to answer most of my questions and to direct me towards more answers. I will look into previous posts for further information. Thanks a lot
K

lyndacarol · Family Elder Joined: Dec 23, 2005 Posts: 457

Jimmylegs, in several things I've read, excess insulin is listed as being involved in the same diseases that you listed, as well as heart disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), high cholesterol, and obesity.

I still think the two (insulin and vitamin D) must be connected!

By the way, when asked for a serum D test, my internist said he did not feel comfortable with that and MS-specific topics. He recommended that I contact a neurologist or MS specialist. I was rather surprised by this. So my next step is to request it of my neuro, with whom I have an "as needed" understanding.

In the meantime, I am sitting in the sunshine more than ever in recent years! No changes yet, but it is pleasant. Thanks.

jimmylegs · Family Elder Joined: Mar 12, 2006 Posts: 1786

kasuku, you're welcome, and if you don't find what you're looking for please let me know

LC, i hope you are successful soon with getting the serum test.

it will be interesting to discover the nature of the link between insulin and vitamin d... i suspect calcium is involved. i have read about insulin being low when vitamin d is high, but i've also recently read (in a diabetes context) that improving vitamin d status INCREASES insulin output. i will keep reading. at this very early point i'm beginning to think that D and calcium between them can help normalize high or low insulin production.