WEST PALM BEACH, FL--45-year-old Debbie Cohen, like most women, is painfully aware of the statistics dealing with breast cancer today.
Debbie Cohen says, "I try to take care of myself, eat right, exercise, exercise with my girls every day. I take a lot of supplements - one of them is vitamin d."
There have been many studies evaluating the effect of vitamin d on breast cancer. The bottom line is that the results are very controversial and mixed.
"The women’s health initiative was a large study of 36,000 women who were randomly assigned treatment to calcium with vitamin d supplements or a placebo which is no supplement at all. In this study which lasted 7 years, there was no difference in breast cancer risks indicating perhaps, the kind of supplements that we normally recommend aren’t really having a major impact on breast cancer," says Dr. Mark D. Pegram,MD, hematology/oncology.
However, that study has been criticized for several reasons.
"The study duration was just 7 years, " says Dr. Mark Pegram, "It's been argued that perhaps the patients treated longer with these supplements or maybe younger in life maybe we would have seen differences. Another shortcoming of the study is the dose of vitamin d was 400 units which is a fairly modest dose. It has been suggested a higher dose may have proven to be more effective. And the third problem is some of the patients that were assigned to placebo treatment actually took vitamin supplements and that might have erased the benefit that might otherwise been seen in the study."
Dr. Mark Pegram says what is clear is that vitamin d alone doesn't significantly reduce the risk of breast cancer.
