Dec. 7, 2009 -- Healthy levels of vitamin D may help patients with a certain type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma live longer.
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have discovered that patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and low vitamin D levels are two times more likely to die from the cancer than patients with optimal levels. Deficient vitamin D levels also increased the chances of cancer progression. "These are some of the strongest findings yet between vitamin D and cancer outcome," Matthew Drake, MD, PhD, an endocrinologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., says in a news release. "While these findings are very provocative, they are preliminary and need to be validated in other studies. However, they raise the issue of whether vitamin D supplementation might aid in treatment for this malignancy."