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Vitamin D is crucial to the human body and is needed for many bodily functions. Many people have done research and written reports on how vitamin D consumption affects specific parts of the human body and development. In this paper, I will analyze three papers that discuss the effect of vitamin D on the human body.
The first report is written by Joan Lappe and discusses the effect vitamin D intake has on cancer incidence. The paper gives solid background information about both vitamin D and cancer and then explains the point of the report. It then talks about how they picked their participants and how they plan on collecting data with them, discussing the different ways they plan on analyzing the data. It discusses how their experiment did not provide solid results but still found trends in their results that show that vitamin D helps decrease the risk of cancer.
The second report is written by Stefanie Vandevijere, about how vitamin D deficiency affects pregnant women. It discusses the importance of vitamin D for the human body, and how it affects women in pregnancy, especially how vitamin D deficiency affects these people, and aims to explore more about how much of an impact it has. The report discusses how it goes about choosing which women to sample, and how they plan on collecting data from their sample size, and how they will analyze the results of their data collection. The paper goes in depth in the results section, splitting their testing group into multiple demographics. The researchers analyze their results, showing that there was a high rate of vitamin D deficiency in the women tested and explain what it means for pregnant women and goes over how to fix vitamin D deficiency.
The third paper is by Lisa Houghton which analyzes how vitamin D levels correlate to different body traits in Thai children. The researchers explain why they chose to analyze Thai children, because previous studies have indicated that there is a large rate of vitamin D deficiency in southeast Asia. They go over how they will measure the vitamin D levels in the children and how they plan on analyzing the data they obtained. They describe their results and analyze them, saying that there was a much lower rate of vitamin D deficiency in the children there than was expected, that girls saw a decrease in vitamin D levels as their age increased, and that girls also had more vitamin D than boys. They also explain why they believe they saw these outcomes and compare their results to similar studies to support them.
All three of these papers have similarities and differences when it comes to their formatting and how they go about writing each section. The paper about Thai children and the one about pregnant women both give detailed abstracts that sum up what their report is about and their general results. The paper about cancer doesn’t follow the standard form of an abstract. Instead of writing a paragraph summarizing their report, they have replaced the abstract with a table listing the objective, the results and other important information line by line. While it is rather unconventional for an abstract it is still very effective and it makes it easy for readers to find any important points they are looking for.[
These three papers all have very similar introductions. They explain the importance of vitamin D to the human body. After discussing the importance of Vitamin D, the reports then talk about how vitamin D is specifically important to their own topic, while transitioning into the purpose of the paper, why they chose to study their specific topic, whether it be how vitamin D levels affect cancer, pregnancy, or child growth. All of their introductions are extremely well written and give the right amount of background info, smoothly transitioning into the topic of the report. All three of the papers give just the right amount of background information that is needed to understand the premises of their experiment making their introductions very efficient at opening the report. For example, the study about thai children makes a very good transition from background info to topic, saying “Given the emerging body of evidence on the role of Vitamin D in health through life, we investigated the Vitamin D status of … children from northeast Thailand” (Houghton). This entice comes after brief background info and quickly transitions into the purpose of the introduction.
The methods sections give good description of how they plan on collecting data, and they make their experiments very easy to replicate. The papers about pregnant women and Thai children give brief summaries of how their analysis will work and what they will do with the data. They talk about how they plan on obtaining their sample size, and what they want to do with it. They then describe what methods they will use for analyzing the results. The paper about pregnancy explains their analysis methods briefly, talking about how they want to analyze women from different regions and correlate diets to vitamin D levels through a series of logistic regression graphs. The one about Thai children describes their statistical methods briefly, talking about how they will use descriptive statistics and linear/quadratic regressions to find correlations in their data. The paper about cancer used many more analysis methods for their data. Whereas the other two papers only had a brief summary, this paper goes into detail about sample size calculations, statistical analysis and post hoc analyses, as those are the three methods they use in their results section. For each different analysis method, the paper goes into detail how they go about utilizing each one. While it makes the methods section considereably longer, it is very helpful to the reader so they can understand exactly what will be happening in the results section. All three reports had very well written methods that allowed for their experiments to be easily duplicated and understood.
The results section for all three papers are straightforward. They gave the results for their experiments, referencing their many figures when needed to help the reader interpret them better. All three reports had graphs or tables that were there to make it easier for readers to understand and interpret the results. For example, the paper about pregnancy provides us many graphs and tables breaking down their sample size, where they’re from and how old they are, and then giving us more tables showing us how vitamin D levels were in the different groups of women. The papers give direct results making it well organized and supplemented by figures so that readers can easily understand all the results.
The discussion section is where these papers interpret the results. The paper about Thai children is in depth about their results. The report discusses the different results they had, such as how there were not as many Thai children with vitamin D deficiency as they believed, and the report says that this may have been because they used a different method of analysis, or that they measured a more sensitive type of vitamin D that would report higher vitamin D values, or because the geographical region they studied was different to previous ones. It repeats this process for many different results, explaining how the vitamin D levels in the children correlated to different body aspects, and then explaining why it is so . The end of the discussion includes a summary of their results highlighting the main points and discusses what they felt would be needed to improve their research, and what additional research should be done to strengthen their findings. The discussions section for that paper is well written and comprehensive. The discussion section for the paper about cancer is also very efficient. They had many results from their experiment, and while some results did yield inconclusive data, they all of their data, explaining whether it agreed with their predictions and if it didn’t agree they explained why they think it didn’t agree with their predictions. They also compare their results to ones found in similar studies to further support their results and give them more evidence to show that vitamin D deficiency can lead to an increase in cancer rates. At the end of the discussion they go over both the strengths and limitations of their experiment discussing how it could be improved. The paper about pregnant women also provides in depth analysis of how their results and gives many reasons for vitamin D deficiency based on their results. While the section of them analyzing their results is nice and in depth, afterwards they try to give advice to help with high vitamin D deficiency rates, but not very well. They say the best way is having governments issue a vitamin D nutrition policy, which is a very lackluster solution. If that is their only solution that part of the discussion should have been left out. Unlike the other two reports they don’t analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their experiment or how to improve on it which should have been included so the researchers can give closing thoughts. Giving thoughts on your own paper is very important as it lets you tell the reader what you want them to take away from the report, and talking about the strengths and weaknesses can lead to ideas for the experiment to be improved upon in other reports.
The only paper that had a conclusion is the one about cancer, and it is a very short one[ , it sums up the results and says that further research should be done to get more solid results. The report about Thai children did not need conclusion since the report was summed up in the end of the discussion. The one about pregnant women really should have included a conclusion when there is no summary at the end of the discussion and the researchers don’t give closing thoughts, the paper almost feels incomplete.
Overall,
all three paper, for the most part, were well written. The paper about cancer was
very in depth and adhered to the standard format of a lab report for the most
part, and when it didn’t adhere, it still was well written and good at
delivering information in a clear way. It goes really in depth for each section
making it so readers can understand exactly what they did and what the results
mean. The paper about Thai children was also well written as it describes
everything in detail, adhering to lab report format the whole way. It makes
everything clear for its readers and gives good analyses on its results as well
as discuses how it can be improved for the future. The paper about pregnant
women is well written for the most part, but it struggles during the discussion
section. It proposes some solutions to the problems that their experiment
found, but it does not go in enough detail about those solutions. It also fails
to include self-reflection from the researchers which makes for a very poor
ending to their paper.
Works Cited
- Houghton, L., Gray, A., Harper, M., Winichagoon, P., Pongcharoen, T. Gowachirapant, S., & Gibson, R. (2014). Vitamin D Status among Thai School Children and the Association with 1,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D and Parathyroid Hormone Levels. PLoS ONE. 9, 8. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0104825
- Lappe J., Watson P., Travers-Gustafson D., Recker R., Garland C., Gorham E., … McDonnell S. (2017). Effect of Vitamin D and Calcium Supplementation on Cancer Incidence in Older Women: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 317, 12. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2613159
Vandevijvere S., Amsalkhir S., Van Oyen H., Moreno-Reyes R. (2012). High Prevalence of Vitamin D Deficiency in Pregnant Women: A National Cross-Sectional Survey. PLoS ONE, 7, 8. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0043868
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Here is the Reflection I wrote after completing the assignment:
I chose to write my lab report analysis on three papers that all covered three similar topics: Vitamin C deficiency. My audience for the paper was someone who knew about he subject and wanted to be able to understand the three papers I was reviewing without ever having to touch them. I feel I ended up neglecting my audience too much and just writing for myself. I failed to acknowledge who the reader was and constantly wrote as if the reader already knew about the papers I was reviewing. I found myself being very vague at times, not providing enough details from the papers making it hard for a reader to follow or understand what happened in the papers at all, which is something that needed improvement in my essay.
A big help in writing this paper was receiving feedback and revisions from both my peers and professor as they really helped me understand the writing style and what was expected of the assignment. This is a new format of paper that I have never written before, so it was good to have other people there to help me understand the format. This assignment also helps me not only for this class but for a future engineering career as I will probably have to write papers like these in the future, and getting the experience now helps.
