Dear Editor:
We thank Professor Lena Napolitano for her insightful comments on our study. One of the concerns raised was regarding the correct interpretation of several words, such as the “length of intervention” mentioned in table 1; therefore, we have changed the duration of studies to intervention in order to include all of the items used in this manuscript. Furthermore, regarding two of the studies, namely by Smith et al., We used the publication years mentioned in the articles themselves, which are different from their citation years [1, 2].
In our subgroup analysis, we divided the studies based on the general health conditions. However, per your recommendations, we also performed the analysis separately in anemic and non-anemic patients. As shown in Fig. 1, the effect of vitamin D was not significant in any of these groups.
Forest plot showing results of a meta-analysis on the effects of vitamin D supplementation on hemoglobin in anemic and non-anemic adults. Data were reported as WMDs with 95% CIs
References
Smith EM, Alvarez JA, Kearns MD, Hao L, Sloan JH, Konrad RJ, et al. High-dose vitamin D3 reduces circulating hepcidin concentrations: a pilot, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in healthy adults. Clin Nutr. 2017;36(4):980–5.
Smith EM, Jones JL, Han JE, Alvarez JA, Sloan JH, Konrad RJ, et al. High-dose vitamin D3 administration is associated with increases in hemoglobin concentrations in mechanically ventilated critically ill adults: a pilot double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. J Parenter Enter Nutr. 2018;42(1):87–94.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
The author(s) read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
None of the authors have any conflict of interest to declare.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
About this article
Cite this article
Arabi, S.M., Ranjbar, G., Bahrami, L.S. et al. Reply to: vitamin D supplementation and hemoglobin: dosing matters in prevention/treatment of anemia. Nutr J 20, 33 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-021-00683-8
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-021-00683-8