Low Vitamin D Linked to More Pain After Mastectomy — SkimNews
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- Researchers at Fayoum University Hospital in Egypt studied 184 breast cancer patients undergoing mastectomy between September 2024 and April 2025, finding that those with vitamin D deficiency (below 30 nmol/L) were three times more likely to experience moderate to severe pain within the first 24 hours after surgery.
- Vitamin D-deficient patients used 112mg more tramadol post-surgery through patient-controlled pumps and received 8 μg more fentanyl during the operation than patients with sufficient levels.
- The pain gap between groups came entirely from moderate pain (scores of 4–6 on a 0–10 scale); no patient in either group reported severe pain (7 or above).
- Postoperative nausea was more common in the vitamin D-deficient group, and vomiting occurred only in that group — though the vomiting difference was not statistically significant and researchers could not rule out chance.
- The observational study, published in Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine, cannot prove that low vitamin D caused the extra pain, since researchers did not measure inflammatory markers or collect data on anxiety, depression, cancer stage, or pre-surgery sleep disturbance.
- The authors suggest that preoperative vitamin D supplementation for breast cancer patients with levels below 30 nmol/L may play a role in modulating postoperative pain — a hypothesis they say needs testing in randomized trials.
Why it matters: Half the mastectomy patients in the study entered surgery vitamin D deficient and used 112mg more tramadol afterward, pointing to a cheap, routinely available intervention — preoperative testing and supplementation — that, if confirmed in larger trials, would change the standard pre-surgical workup for thousands of women each year.
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