No evidence that vitamin D is able to prevent or affect severity of COVID-19 in individuals with European ancestry: A Mendelian randomisation study of open data

Abstract

Copyright © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Background Upper respiratory tract infections are reportedly more frequent and more severe in individuals with lower vitamin D levels. Based on these findings, it has been suggested that vitamin D can prevent or reduce the severity of COVID-19.

Methods We used two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) to assess the causal effect of vitamin D levels on SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and COVID-19 severity using publicly available data. We also carried out a genome-wide association analysis (GWA) of vitamin D deficiency in the UK Biobank (UKB) and used these results and two-sample MR to assess the causal effect of vitamin D deficiency on SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and COVID-19 severity.

Results We found no evidence that vitamin D levels causally affect the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection (ln(OR)=0.17 (95% CI −0.22 to 0.57, p=0.39)) nor did we find evidence that vitamin D levels causally affect COVID-19 severity (ln(OR)=0.36 (95% CI −0.89 to 1.61, p=0.57)). Based on our GWA analysis, we found that 17 independent variants are associated with vitamin D deficiency in the UKB. Using these variants as instruments for our two-sample MR analyses, we found no evidence that vitamin D deficiency causally affects the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection (ln(OR)=−0.04 (95% CI −0.1 to 0.03, p=0.25)) nor did we find evidence that vitamin D deficiency causally affects COVID-19 severity (ln(OR)=−0.24 (95% CI −0.55 to 0.08, p=0.14)).

Conclusions In conclusion, we found no evidence that vitamin D is protective against SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 severity. Our data support the recent statement by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence that the use of vitamin D supplementation to mitigate COVID-19 is not supported by the available data.