The Effect of High Dose Vitamin D3 on Physical Performance in Frail Older Adults. A Feasibility Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Vitamin D deficiency is ubiquitous in frailty but the effectiveness of vitamin D supplementation to improve outcomes in frail individuals is unclear. It has been postulated that higher than the current recommended doses (800 IU/day) may be needed to achieve a neuromuscular effect in frail individuals. OBJECTIVES: 1) determine if 4000 IU per day of vitamin D3 is safe for frail older adults; and 2) establish the efficacy of this dose to improve physical performance outcomes in this population. DESIGN: Open-label, feasibility study. SETTING: Community retirement centre. PARTICIPANTS: 40 older adults with frail or pre-frail characteristics. INTERVENTION: 4000 IU of vitamin D3 and 1200 mcg of calcium carbonate daily for four months. MEASUREMENTS: Physical performance (grip strength, gait speed and short physical performance battery score), cognitive health and vitamin D and iPTH serum levels before and after the intervention. RESULTS: Frail individuals improved short physical performance battery score (1.19, p = 0.005), fast gait speed (4.65, p = 0.066) and vitamin D levels (7.81, p = 0.011). Only frail females made a significant improvement in grip strength (1.92, p = 0.003). Stratifying the sample by baseline vitamin D levels revealed that participants with vitamin D insufficiency (≤ 75 nmol/L) significantly improved short physical performance battery score (1.06, p = 0.04), fast gait speed (6.28, p = 0.004) and vitamin D levels (25.73, p = <0.0001). Pre-frail individuals, as well as those with sufficient vitamin D levels (> 75 nmol/L) made no significant improvement in any outcome. CONCLUSIONS: Vitamin D supplementation using 4000 IU/daily is safe and has a modest beneficial effect on physical performance for frail individuals and those with insufficient vitamin D levels. Participants with vitamin D insufficiency (≤ 75 nmol/L) showed greater benefits. Our feasibility study provides results to help calculate effect size for a future RCT.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".