Seniors who take calcium supplements along with vitamin D may lengthen their lives, a new analysis suggests.
However, only the combination of the two appears to be effective; vitamin D by itself had no benefit, the researchers noted.
“Our study provides evidence of a cause-effect
relationship — that calcium and vitamin D causes
beneficial effects to
general health,” said study author Dr. Lars Rejnmark, an assistant
professor at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark. “Calcium with
vitamin D has now been proven to reduce risk of osteoporotic fractures
and death in the elderly.”
The report will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
For the study, Rejnmark’s team collected data on more
than 70,000 people who were around 70 years old and had taken part in
one of eight trials that pitted vitamin D or vitamin D plus calcium
against an inactive placebo by randomly assigning participants to one of
the treatments.
The investigators found that, over three years,
vitamin D alone did not reduce the risk of death (mortality), but when
taken with calcium mortality was reduced 9 percent.
It is known that the combination of vitamin D and calcium can reduce bone fractures in older people.
However, Rejnmark’s group noted that the reduction in
mortality seen in this analysis was not due to fewer fractures, but an
effect of these supplements that went beyond bone health.
Recently there has been data tying calcium supplements to an increased risk of heart attack.
A study in the May edition of Heart found that
calcium supplementation increased the risk of heart attack by 86
percent. But the risk was not increased with calcium from foods.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force
proposed that postmenopausal women not take low-dose calcium and vitamin
D supplements daily to ward off bone fractures, because the effect is
negligible.
Dr. Michael Holick, a professor of medicine,
physiology and biophysics at Boston University School of Medicine, said
that “other studies have shown that if you have adequate vitamin D, [it]
can reduce the risk of mortality by about 7 percent.”
Although the exact mechanism of why these supplements
prolong life isn’t known, Holick believes that both improve cell
function and cardiovascular health, he said.
Holick also believes the task force misunderstood the
data on the benefit of vitamin D and calcium. He said the amount of
these supplements taken in the studies they looked at were too low to
have any beneficial effect.
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