This is the era of highly active, vigorous seniors and in recent years one way seniors have tried to stay healthy was by taking lots of Calicium and Vitamin D supplements to help their bones.
The medical scuttlebutt has been that the two supplements helped prevent fractures.
No more.
Two studies have come out saying the supplements don’t help. According to the BBC:
Taking vitamin D or calcium does not help prevent repeat fractures in elderly people, a study suggests. Two studies by researchers at Aberdeen and York universities looked at people who had already had a fracture due to osteoporosis.
Many people take vitamin D and calcium to try to protect their bones, but the study found those taking supplements did not go on to have fewer fractures. Osteoporosis campaigners said taking supplements would not cause any harm.
Med Page Today has some more details, including a summary chart, but here’s a key point:
That surprising finding from a multicenter study, published on line in The Lancet dated April 28, contradicts the long-held belief that over-the-counter calcium and vitamin D supplementation could help older patients with a history of low-trauma fracture. Instead, the study found no significant differences between the groups who took vitamin D and calcium either alone or combined compared with those who took a placebo.
“There was no evidence that supplementation might be especially useful for specific groups or that true differences could have been obscured by poor compliance,” wrote Adrian M. Grant, M.D., of the University of Aberdeen and colleagues.
Actually, this is the latest chapter in an ongoing debate over supplements’ effectiveness. Many people (like this writer) swear by them. However, there is a school of thought that many pill-form vitamins are really close to worthless. The usual expression that’s used is that as far as benefits are concerned, people who use supplments merely wind up having “expensive urine.”
The phrase comes up often in the debate over whether supplements live up to their advance billing:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.