Written By: Longjam Dineshwori | Updated : June 23, 2020 9:42 AM IST
Taking Vitamin D supplements may benefit patients receiving anti-cancer therapy. © Shutterstock
Vitamin D is essential to keep your bones, teeth and muscles healthy. It can also protect you against a range of health conditions, such as type 1 diabetes, respiratory infections, cognitive decline, dementia and more. Now, a new study has revealed another health benefit of the sunshine vitamin. It suggested that taking vitamin D supplements may help prevent a potentially severe side effect of a revolutionary form of anti-cancer therapy.
Dr. Osama Rahma of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, in Boston, and his colleagues conducted a study to examine whether taking vitamin D supplements might reduce the risk of colitis in patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors to treat their cancer.
The study included 213 melanoma patients who received immune checkpoint inhibitors between 2011 and 2017. Out of which, 66 patients took vitamin D supplements before starting treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors. In all, 17 percent patients developed colitis. But the odds of developing colitis were found to be 65 percent lower in patients who took vitamin D, after adjustments for confounding factors. To validate their finding, the researchers studied another group of 169 patients, of whom 49 developed colitis. In this new group, use of vitamin D was linked with 54 percent lower odds of developing colitis.
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses the power of the body's own immune system to prevent, control, and eliminate cancer. There are different forms of cancer immunotherapy such as targeted antibodies, cancer vaccines, adoptive cell transfer, tumour-infecting viruses, checkpoint inhibitors, cytokines, and adjuvants. Immunotherapy may be used along with surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, or targeted therapies to improve their effectiveness. While immunotherapy helping save the lives of many cancer patients, some forms of this treatment may lead to severe side effects.
Checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a form of cancer immunotherapy that targets proteins called checkpoints, key regulators of the immune system. Checkpoint inhibitors block these checkpoint proteins from binding with their partner proteins. This allows immune cells called T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells.
Although these treatments have helped many patients have prolonged lives, they can cause side effects such as colitis, inflammation of the inner lining of the colon. People suffering from colitis may experience symptoms like abdominal pain, cramping, bloating, and diarrhoea.
"Immune checkpoint inhibitor-induced colitis can limit the use of such life-saving drugs leading to discontinuation of treatment," noted Dr. Rahma.
If validated in future prospective studies, Dr. Rahma believes that their findings of a link between vitamin D intake and reduced risk for colitis could lead to better outcome of the therapy.
"Vitamin D supplementation should be tested further to determine if it could be a safe, easily accessible, and cost-effective approach towards preventing immunotherapy's gastrointestinal toxicity and extending the effectiveness of immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment in cancer patients," he added.
The findings are published online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society (ACS).
