Emerging serious risks now make calcium supplementation an unwise choice. A five year Auckland University study was recently halted upon finding that supplementing with 1000mg of calcium a day increased the incidence of heart attack by 40 percent in women over 70 years. More
Calcium Supplements Could Raise Heart Risks in Postmenopausal Women
February 3, 2008 by Gillian Sanson
Posted in ARTICLES, BONE HEALTH, OSTEOPOROSIS | 4 Comments
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Barbara Seaman
Barbara Seaman,
co-founder of the US NationalWomen’s Health Network, and author of The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women challenges the surgical practice of removing perfectly healthy ovaries in her article Keeping all your eggs in one basket. Recently published
I haven’t seen mention of this anywhere and wondered, were the women taking the calcium with magnesium in a 2 to 1 ratio?
And where are the numbers? Just how many does this 49 percent mean, in absolute numbers. I’d appreciate your having a look at that, if you have access to the full study.
I posted a question here and it’s disappeared. Trying again: were the women in the study also taking magnesium? I understood that is the way calcium is to be taken; and if they weren’t, wonder if that was the result of the negative outcome.
Full study is: Bolland MJ, Barber AP, Doughty RN, et al. Vascular events in healthy older women receiving calcium supplementation: randomized controlled trial. BMJ 2008; DOI:10.1136/bmj.39440.525752.BE. Available at: http://www.bmj.com.
The New Zealand team randomized 1471 postmenopausal women (average age 74 years) to either calcium supplementation (1 g/day calcium citrate) or placebo. As well as bone density, they looked at adverse cardiovascular events over five years: death, sudden death, MI, angina, other chest pain, stroke, transient ischemic attack, and a composite end point of MI, stroke, or sudden death.
Principal investigator Ian Reid says the study collected data on MIs and strokes “in a much more careful way” than any other previous studies have done. “We got cardiologists and other people involved and audited all those things and went back to patients’ hospital records and so on.”
MI was more commonly reported in the calcium group than in the placebo group (45 events in 31 women vs 19 events in 14 women, p=0.01), and the composite end point was also reached more often in the calcium group (101 events in 69 women vs 54 events in 42 women, p=0.008). Even after adjudication, MI remained more common in the calcium group, as did the composite end point.
I understand that particpants were given 1g (1,000mg) of soluble calcium daily. There is no mention of magnesium being given concurrently.
Thanks for your response. And thanks also for linking Barbara Seaman’s articles. She was a gem, and I will miss her very much.