Very high doses of vitamin D may help critically ill patients with respiratory failure leave the hospital sooner, a small study suggests.
Vitamin D is thought to increase the ability of immune cells to fight infection—but hospitalized patients often have insufficient levels of it because of their lack of exercise and exposure to the sun.
For the study, 31 patients were divided into three groups. Two of the groups received high doses of vitamin D3 (a total of 250,000 or 500,000 international units over five days), and one received a placebo.
