Is a vitamin D test worth adding to my checkup or is it just another add-on? The pharmacy offered me one too

Hello all, new here, found the board through the private screening package article which saved me a fair bit of money already.

I'm 50 next month and booked a basic check through work. The booking page has vitamin D as a tick box add-on, cheap compared to everything else. Then the same week the pharmacy near me had a sign up offering finger prick vitamin D tests. Everyone I know seems to be on vitamin D, half my friends have had "low" results, and I live somewhere grey and northern, so I don't exactly see the sun from October to April.

So do I tick it? Part of me thinks it's cheap, why not. The other part has read enough on here to suspect the answer is going to be "what would you do with the number". I'm asking anyway because I genuinely don't know if vitamin D is one of the useful ones.

Ha, you've already answered your own question in the last paragraph and you know it.

I ticked it in my first package. Came back "insufficient". The advice was to take a supplement. My girlfriend's came back "normal". The advice was to take a supplement in winter. Same tablet, same aisle, two different results.

The one place I've seen it actually earn its keep is my own bone density saga (the thread about mum's hip is on here). When my GP decided to look properly at my bones, vitamin D was one of the bloods she ordered as part of that, alongside calcium and a couple of others, because it fed into what she'd recommend. That's a test with a job.

A tick box on a booking page with nobody waiting to act on it is a different thing.

Rhona, I'm the person who once ticked that box, got "insufficient" back, and bought an enormous tub of high dose capsules off a shelf without ever having it rechecked. So I'm not going to judge the impulse.

What I've learned since, and Dr Vandermeer checked this for me, is that vitamin D is one of the tests where the evidence for routine screening in people who feel well is genuinely thin. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force looked at it in 2021 and concluded the balance of benefits and harms of screening adults without symptoms can't be determined. Part of the reason is that nobody agrees on the level that counts as deficient, so callum's "insufficient" and his girlfriend's "normal" could easily be labs using different cut-offs, and part is that trials treating low levels in people without symptoms didn't show fewer fractures or deaths.

Where it changes things is where Annika says: symptoms like bone pain or muscle weakness, a bone condition, or a medical reason you might not absorb it well. In those cases a clinician is waiting to use the number. For everyone else, public health advice in some countries, the NHS for example, is already to consider 10 micrograms a day through autumn and winter without a test, and you sound like you're right in the middle of that group. Do check with your own GP or pharmacist if you take other medicines, and don't go above the upper limit on the label.

The wider "what would I do with the result" logic is in should you pay for a private health screening package.

Worth knowing the finger prick ones and the lab ones aren't always comparable either. My sister did a pharmacy one, came back low, did the GP one a month later and it was mid range. Nobody could tell her which was right. That's an expensive way to end up confused.

Closing my own thread. Didn't tick it.

Mentioned it to the nurse at the checkup instead and she said almost word for word what Marisol did: no symptoms, no bone history, so take the standard winter dose and don't pay to find out what you'd do anyway. Bought a box of the 10 microgram ones for about the price of a coffee. Spent the money I saved on a decent waterproof, which given where I live is the better health investment.