Dear Editor,As medical students at the University of Manchester, we read with great interest the article “Vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19: A case-control study at a tertiary care hospital in India published in the Annals of Medicine and Surgery by Elsevier [1]. Whilst the study illustrates the link between COVID -19 and Vitamin D deficiency, we noted that the criteria does not take into account the patients’ ethnicity, skin colour, the country or specific region the patient lives and has been residing in the past year. All these factors have shown to influence the levels of vitamin D, hence, excluding these is a limitation for the study and will reduce its viability [[2], [3], [4]]. We would also like to highlight a limitation that has not been noted in the study which is about the occupation of the patients. The latter can lead to different levels of exposure to vitamin D and therefore influence the results.To conclude, the study has shown an interesting link between vitamin D deficiency and COVID 19 which further adds on to the current literature research on the link between vitamin D and COVID 19. However, we strongly believe that in order for the study to be more reliable, it is of great importance to gather data from a larger sample of patients and to take into account the demographical information we have mentioned in this present letter. Additionally, the skin type of the patients and occupation should be taken into consideration in order to get a more reliable data to improve the clinical significance of the study.
Article (citation)
Nimavat N, Singh S, Singh P, Singh SK, Sinha N. Vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19: A case-control study at a tertiary care hospital in India. Ann Med Surg [Internet]. 2021 Aug 1 [cited 2021 Aug 20]; 68:102,661. Available from: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2049080121006117.
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