High-dose vitamin D shows benefit in patients with advanced colorectal cancer
Results of a small clinical trial suggest that supplementing chemotherapy with high doses of vitamin D may benefit patients with metastatic colorectal cancer by delaying progression of the disease, say scientists from Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Prompted by the “very encouraging” results of the Sunshine clinical trial, the potential benefits of vitamin D supplementation in metastatic colorectal cancer will be evaluated in a larger clinical trial planned to open at several hundred sites across the U.S. later this year, said Kimmie Ng, director of clinical research in Dana-Farber’s Gastrointestinal Cancer Center, and corresponding author of the Sunshine study. “To our knowledge, this study is the first completed randomized clinical trial of vitamin D supplementation for treatment of advanced or metastatic colorectal cancer,” Ng said. In the high-dose group, patients had a median delay of 13 months before their disease worsened; in the low-dose group, the median delay was 11 months. In addition, patients in the...