tamin D on calcium absorption or diminished increases in calcium absorption as vitamin D intake increases would provide a scientific rationale against excessive vitamin D supplementation and avoid pushing serum 25(OH)D concentrations to unnecessarily high levels.None of the authors had any conflicts of interest with respect to the work presented.
Jean HuangDepartment of Clinical Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Metabolism City of Hope National Medical Center Duarte, CA
Reply to J Huang et alDear Sir:We thank Huang et al for their interest in our work and for their stimulating comments regarding the evidence of a vitamin D threshold on calcium absorption. The exploration or discovery of a threshold effect is statistically complex. Generally, there is no single approach that is sufficient (1). We presented several approaches to exploring the question of threshold, and nonlinearity in general. First (and most important), we visually examined and presented raw data via scatterplots and evaluated the nature of the relation via smoothing (loess) techniques to determine heuristically whether there was any evidence of a nonlinear effect. Second, linear, quadratic, and cubic spline models with a priori knots selected were fitted. The results from these models were not treated as sufficient to conclude a lack of a threshold, but rather they provided additional evidence that a nonlinear relation was not supported by the data at hand. Although the authors provide 2 references where polynomial parameterization and spline methods were not used, this clearly does not preclude the usefulness of this type of approach in exploring nonlinearity (2).We state in the article that our data do not support a threshold effect, not that there is no threshold effect. There are factors in any study that hinder the detection of effects. Sample size is one such factor, and we acknowledge this. Small samples increase the probability of type II error and restrict the exploration of effects in certain subgroups of interest. Furthermore, as the authors point out, our range of vitamin D dose and concentration of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] was limited to a specific range; thus, we cannot be certain whether a threshold effect may indeed exist on the edge or outside of this range. These kinds of limitations are shared across most studies of this type.As we described in our methods, we examined piecewise linear models for calcium absorption, treating a 10-wk 25(OH)D concentration of 80 nmol/L as our a priori threshold and examining whether the relation between calcium absorption and 25(OH)D changes at this threshold. On the basis of the results of this exploration and the fact that the P values corresponding to the test for a change in slope at 80 nmol/L in both unadjusted and adjusted models were insignificant (P ¼ 0.20 and 0.17, respectively), we strongly stand by our original reported model: 10-wk calcium absorption was observed to be a linear function of 10-wk 25(OH)D in our measured range of 25(OH)D.As the authors correctly point out, the estima...