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Can vitamin D fight COVID-19 - interview of Dr. Matthews Oct 2020

Can vitamin D help fight COVID-19? ABC News Interview - 6 minutes

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  • 00:00 Speaker 1: Some intriguing research about a possible link between COVID-19 outcomes and vitamin D, something that most Americans, and especially people of color, are severely lacking. Known as the sunshine vitamin, it's produced by the body in response to sun exposure and found in some foods like fish, eggs, and fortified dairy and grains. Tonight, we bring in Dr. L. Ray Matthews, who studies vitamin D. He's a recently retired trauma surgeon and researcher at Morehouse School of Medicine in Grady Hospital Atlanta. Thanks so much for joining us, doctor.
  • 00:30 Dr. L. Ray Matthews: Thank you for having me.
  • 00:32 S1: So as a trauma surgeon in an inner city hospital, you saw some of the worst injuries imaginable. What happened when you decided to administer large doses of vitamin D at prescription levels?
  • 00:44 Matthews: Well, after we started giving vitamin D, which is really a hormone. So it's a hormone, it's not a true vitamin. So hormones work different from vitamins. Vitamins are just spark plugs that make reactions go at a faster rate. The vitamin or hormone D controls 3,000 out of the 30,000 genes in a human body, among those are your immune response system and your inflammatory response system. Those two are very important for a surgeon because my job is to reduce infection and reduce inflammatory responses.
  • 01:16 S1: Now, everyone needs vitamin D, but you say that half the world's population actually has a deficiency. Would we all be healthier and able to heal faster if we took vitamin D supplements?
  • 01:28 Matthews: Yes, we would. Actually, we decreased the hospitalization of our patients, their length of stay about three or four days on the floors and the ICUs. So our patients healed faster, they had fewer infections, fewer heart attacks, fewer strokes. They got well and came back to clinic and most of them didn't want any narcotics and most of them went back to work and they were actually productive paying members of society instead of relying on public assistance.
  • 01:56 S1: Are you concerned at all about the pandemic causing more people to stay inside and thus reducing their exposure to sunlight and limiting their amount of vitamin D?
  • 02:07 Matthews: No, you can supplement Lindsey. I take a supplement. I'm indoors a lot, and as a surgeon, I used to work 80-100 hours a week. And so you can imagine, I didn't get outside often. So you can take supplements which would help.
  • 02:22 S1: And you say that obesity also plays a role in vitamin D levels?
  • 02:26 Matthews: Yes, it does. The vitamin D gets stored in the fat cells instead of being in the blood cells. So there are about 30 different conditions that can lower your vitamin D level.
  • 02:35 S1: And tell us why getting enough Vitamin D is a particular concern for African Americans and anyone with darker or browner skin?
  • 02:43 Matthews: Well, dark-skinned people usually have lower vitamin D levels because we have melanin in our skin, and melanin is a natural sunscreen, which blocks 98% of vitamin D production. So a dark-skinned person would have to stand outside three to 10 times longer in the sun in order to make the same amount of vitamin D. As a result, dark-skinned people tend to have their vitamin D levels 30% lower than the average lighter skinned person.
  • 03:09 S1: And let's get to COVID-19 in particular. What does the research tell us about the potential links between vitamin D and COVID outcomes and what might it mean for black and brown communities?
  • 03:21 Matthews: The research now that it's coming out is showing what I've been saying all along and doing all along. Actually as a trauma surgeon, patients are on the ventilators. They get ventilator-associated pneumonia. When I started at Grady, approximately 13-14 years ago, they had a 80% incidents of pneumonia. So when I started my high-dose protocol vitamin D regimen, we reduced our incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia down to 20%. The national average is 10%. And we killed or reduced all type of pneumonias, viral, bacterial, fungal, it basically works against any pneumonia. If you understand the biochemistry and the pathophysiology of how pathogens hurt the body, you can understand the mechanism, you can kill anything basically.
  • 04:10 S1: So COVID-19, though, in particular, what's your thought as it pertains to vitamin D?
  • 04:15 Matthews: The way COVID works is that what vitamin D does is, like I said, it's a hormone so it increases your white blood cell count. White blood cells are the things that fight off the bacteria, the viruses, and the fungus. For the medical personnel, if you supplement your patients with vitamin D, about four or five days later, you'll see an increase in their CD4 count, which is T-cell, or another name for white blood cell. So you can directly measure it in terms of biomarkers. And also in COVID or coronavirus, when you... They have a lot of inflammation in their bodies. You see the C-reactive protein and Interleukin 6, those are medical terms, these are just biomarkers in the blood, and you see those decrease. So you see the CD4 white count go up and you see the inflammation decrease. So those are two things that COVID does. Basically has harmed the body with all the inflammatory reactions that it causes.
  • 05:10 S1: So just some of the early studies that have come out with regard to vitamin D and finding people who have deficiencies, I guess, in vitamin D, they don't seem to be faring as well with COVID-19, is that right?
  • 05:23 Matthews: Yes, the lower your vitamin D level, the worse you do. There's a study, came out in annuals of medicine years ago, that showed when your vitamin D level gets less than 18 nanograms per milliliter, that's the amount of vitamin D measure in your blood, your risk of death goes up 30% for all causes. Well, there's coronavirus, regular pneumonia, flu, traumatic brain injuries, gunshot wound victims, so having low vitamin D levels increase your hospital... I wrote a paper saying low Vitamin D levels increased the mortality rate, hospital length of stay, and hospital cost.
  • 06:01 S1: Dr. Matthew, is really fascinating stuff. We thank you so much for your time.
  • 06:05 Matthews: Thank you for having me.

Some of Dr. Mtathews In Vitamin D Life


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12056 2X fewer COVID-19 deaths observed if infrequent vitamin D (2X more deaths if daily dose) – UK Oct 20, 2020 190
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12055 Many problems with Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine – Nov 9, 2020 98
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12031 Evidence Regarding Vitamin D and Risk of COVID-19 and its Severity - Oct 27, 2020 305
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12052 Common sense COVID-19 risk reduction - masks, social distancing, vitamin D - Oct 2020 91
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11797 Evidence Supports a Causal Model for Vitamin D in COVID-19 Outcomes – June 3, 2020 875
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12048 COVID-19 probably fought by 40 ng of Vitamin D - quickly achieved with 200K-400K IU - Oct 28, 2020 161
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12047 COVID-19 1.7X more likely to be severe if low Vitamin D - meta-analysis Oct 2020 97
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12037 COVID-19 increased risks with low vitamin D: Infection 1.5 X, Hospitalization 1.8 X – meta-analysis Oct 2020 302
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12046 Chinese COVID-19 study – 80 pct of severe cases had low Vitamin D, all asymptomatic cases had OK Vit D – Oct 13, 2020 200
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12010 9X COVID-19 survival in nursing home if had 80,000 IU dose of vitamin D in previous month – Oct 2020 789
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12036 European COVID-19 2nd wave start dates were associated with latitude (vitamin D), not temperature – Oct 31, 2020 216
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11740 COVID-19 mortality rate highest North of 35 degrees latitude (Vitamin D) – April 20, 2020 1650
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11753 More Vitamin K and formented food associated with fewer COVID-19 problems 1385
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12026 COVID-19 patients who happened to be taking Vitamin D did much better – Oct 27,2020 269
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12025 COVID-19 was killing dark-skinned doctors, then they got a Vitamin D recommendation 502
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12024 Can vitamin D fight COVID-19 - interview of Dr. Matthews Oct 2020 200
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12012 COVID-19 and Vitamin D - 14 studies as of Oct 16, 2020 179
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11795 COVID-19 resulted in 3.7X decrease in Irish Very Low Weight Births (Vitamin D) - June 2020 608
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3780 Vitamin D can inhibit enveloped virus (e.g. Herpes, Zoster, Epstein, Hepatitis, Ebola) – March 2011 41350
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5894 Vitamin D and the anti-viral state – March 2010 3567
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11681 Vitamin D supplementation could prevent and treat influenza, CORONAVIRUS, and pneumonia infections - March 2020 4009
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11749 COVID-19 association with Vitamin D also being explored by Hollis and Wagner - April 2020 1283
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11716 Global Push for RCTs in COVID-19 - April 4, 2020 663
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11707 Preventing a COVID-19 pandemic with Vitamin D – Grant April 2020 1559
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10823 How Vitamin D helps fight the cold, flu and other viruses - June 2019 516
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7470 Many Infectious diseases (virus) treated and prevented by Vitamin D – review July 2009 4463
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11958 Rate of COVID-19 test positive is 40 pcnt lower if high vitamin D (192,000 people) - Holick Sept 2020 687
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