Vitamin D and Omega 3 fish oil for treating depression??

[JohnBoy2000]

I ditched my old shrink cause he was refusing to prescribe me the required meds, and hooked up with this retired dude that practices privately.

Spent a fair bit of time reviewing history etc - and ultimately, he wrote me a script for what I was asking - Mianserin - the analogue of Mirtazapine.

But he also mentioned that, Vitamin D and Omega 3 fish oil used in high doses, can prove of remarkable benefit to some.

I haven't read or heard anything on this.
There was some talk of l-methylfolate, SAMe, vitamin B in active form etc - but Vitamin D and fish oil??

Has anyone the remotest piece of information or knowledge on, or surrounding this??

 

[Cotcha Yankinov]

If you don't get much sun or if you live far north then vitamin D is important to supplement with

 

[AlphaMethylPhenyl]

You should get your vitamin levels tested in general, then go by doctor's recommendations from there.

If they tell you that taking such-and-such amount of EPA/DHA (the main active acids in fish oil), then who's to say we know better?

 

[Solipsis]

I agree on the vitamin D - I have personally had deficiency and ultra-dosed treatment and also take regular normal dosed supplements of it. But it will make a difference if you're deficient, otherwise I don't think so. Being deficient can give you plenty of problems but unsure about depression. It definitely didn't help me.

A lot I read on fish oil involved junk science behind claims, although I guess not all of them. But it's worth debunking the ones that need debunking. As for depression, it seems evidence is only tentative / suggestive but it seems premature to actually recommend it. There may be correlation that suggests something about lowering risk of getting depressed in the first place, which doesn't mean it is necessarily a treatment once you are already depressed.
Why would you just accept any doc or healthcare professional on their authority without asking questions? As if plenty wouldn't recommend a supplement based on some very tentative promise? The advantage of placebo involved may make it very unclear as to whether there is truly any medical benefit whatsoever.

If you can find other medical benefits from fish oils based on actual evidence then if anything you could just try it because of potential cost/benefit and it 'couldn't hurt'.

 

[JK25]

In persons with a chronic medical disease, depression often makes the management of chronic illness more difficult. Recently, vitamin D has been reported in the scientific and lay press as an important factor that may have significant health benefits in the prevention and the treatment of many chronic illnesses. Whether this is due to insufficient dietary intake, lifestyle (e.g., little outdoor exposure to sunshine), or other factors is addressed in this paper. In addition, groups at risk and suggested treatment for inadequate vitamin D levels are addressed. Effective detection and treatment of inadequate vitamin D levels in persons with depression and other mental disorders may be an easy and cost-effective therapy which could improve patients’ long-term health outcomes as well as their quality of life.

The mechanism whereby vitamin D may be associated with mental disorders is not clearly understood. It has been reported that there are vitamin D receptors in the hypothalamus, which may be important in neuroendocrine functioning.

There has been research examining the relationship of vitamin D to seasonal affective disorder (SAD), schizophrenia, and depression. Several studies have examined whether light therapy improved mood. Partonen, Vakkuri, Lamberg-Allardt, and Lonnqvist (1996) randomized 29 patients (16 with SAD and 13 controls) in a parallel fashion to either one hour or 15 minutes of light therapy in the morning for two weeks in the winter. One hour of light therapy significantly decreased depressive symptoms more so in the group with SAD than the control group (p = .003). Gloth, Alam, and Hollis (1999) randomized 15 participants with SAD to either 100,000 IU of vitamin D (one time dose) (n = 8) or phototherapy (n = 7). They reported that depression (assessed with the Hamilton Depression Scale) decreased in persons who received vitamin D (from 10.9 to 6.2, p = .040) as compared to those who received phototherapy (from 12.6 to 11.3, p = ns). There were no untoward side effects from the dose of vitamin D; however, a limitation of the study was the one time dose.


Studies have examined the relationship of vitamin D to other psychiatric disorders. In a prospective birth cohort that studied the intake of vitamin D supplements in the first year of life, it was noted that an intake of 2,000 IU or more per day was associated with a reduced risk of developing schizophrenia (RR = 0.23, CI = .06–.95) for males. The limitations of the study were that although there was a large sample (over 9,114 persons), the number of individuals with schizophrenia was small (n = 79) (McGrath et al., 2004). In addition, exposure to vitamin D was based on the mother’s self-report in the first year of life. Lower levels of vitamin D have been noted with other mental disorders. Schneider, Weber, Frensch, Stein, and Fritze (2000) reported that vitamin D levels were lower in persons with schizophrenia (Mean = 35.1 pg/ml) and major depression (37.3) when compared to healthy controls (45.9). However, the difference was lower only for those with schizophrenia when compared to the controls.