Study of the Association Between Serum Vitamin D Levels and Prostate Cancer.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in this observational study publication.

This study evaluated the association of prostate cancer diagnosis with vitamin D levels as well as with each of the following variables of interest: age, race group, military service, smoking status, and alcohol use.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, men only.

A total of 11,547 adult males aged 18 or older who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for years 2001-2010 were included in this retrospective, cross-sectional, observational study.

National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey is an annual, nationally representative sample of noninstitutionalized civilian adult and child residents of the United States.

How the Study Was Run

Active duty military are excluded from the survey.

Subjects were excluded if they answered "don't know" or "refused" to vitamin D or prostate cancer survey questions. χ2 analyses were performed to analyze associations between diagnosis of prostate cancer and variables of interest.

The military service variable was developed on the basis of the response to survey question "Did you ever serve in the Armed Forces of the United States?" A multivariable logistic regression model included all the variables of interest that were available in the database.

All analyses were appropriately weighted for extrapolation to average annual population-based estimates for the years included in the study.

What Was Measured

This study evaluated the association of prostate cancer diagnosis with vitamin D levels as well as with each of the following variables of interest: age, race group, military service, smoking status, and alcohol use.

The subject headings attached to it are Alcohol Drinking, Black People, Cross-Sectional Studies, Prostatic Neoplasms, Smoking, Surveys and Questionnaires and Vitamin D.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is an observational study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2017 (Military medicine), a journal based in England.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.