Calcium

It seems like the pinnacle of medical science: For just a few hundred dollars, you can walk into just about any hospital in Southern California and ask a doctor to check your arteries for buildup of heart-attack-inducing calcium plaque. Most of the time, what goes on inside our bodies is a mystery, but there's something satisfying in the thought that a sophisticated piece of equipment can measure just how clogged our arteries really are (and how much more junk food we can afford, or not afford, to eat)

More than half of American women over the age of 60 take vitamin D and calcium supplements, but the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said this week that they're probably wasting their money. In a new recommendations from the federal government's expert panel on preventive medicine, the task force says that most postmenopausal women should not take vitamin D and calcium to reduce their risk of bone fractures. The dosages assessed were 400 international units (IUs) of vitamin D3 and 1,000 milligrams of calcium per day. The conclusions are based on an analysis of six randomized trials designed to study the health effects of vitamin D and calcium supplements.

New boxes of reformulated Total, the popular cereal made by General Mills, note that a single serving now contains 100% of the Daily Value, or DV, for calcium. Question is, is that enough calcium for you? And how much calcium does it contain anyway? Part of the problem is that federal regulations require food companies to display outdated nutritional information rather than the latest dietary allowances for calcium by the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences.

Taking calcium supplements increases the risk of having a heart attack, Swiss and German researchers reported Wednesday. The finding adds to the growing body of evidence that such supplements increase the risk to those who take them while providing only minimal benefits. The study is considered important because large numbers of people, especially elderly women, continue to take the supplements in hopes of minimizing loss of bone density. The body of evidence now seems to suggest that calcium consumed as part of a normal diet can, indeed, increase bone density and perhaps help lower blood pressure, but that supplements may be too risky for most people to take.

A carrot a day may keep osteoporosis away -- if that carrot has been genetically modified. "Fruits and vegetables are generally a pretty low source of calcium," says Jay Morris, a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine's Children's Nutrition Research Center in Houston and lead author of a study published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Older women who took calcium supplements twice a day reduced their risk of breaking a bone, researchers have found, but getting them to take the pills proved to be a problem. Nearly half the 1,460 healthy women older than 70 who participated in the study did not consistently take the twice-daily 600-milligram pills, which led the researchers to doubt whether supplements could be useful as preventive therapy.

Calcium is important for bone health, but medical experts have long debated how much calcium people should consume to reduce the risk of osteoporosis later in life. A new study suggests that the U.S. recommendation for adult women may be unnecessarily high. The recommended dietary allowance for women ages 51 and older in the United States is 1,200 milligrams a day --  compared with the recommendation in the United Kingdom of 700 milligrams per day. The new study, published online Tuesday in the British Medical Journal , suggests that consuming more than 700 mg a day won't help.

Many over-the-counter calcium supplements that millions take to keep bones strong contain small amounts of lead that could be a health risk if recommended doses are exceeded, research suggests. About 5% of the U.S. population takes the supplements, including a sizable number of menopausal women, who face an increased risk of osteoporosis as their bodies stop producing estrogen. About 10 million Americans suffer from the bone-thinning disease.

A hormone that helps the body absorb calcium apparently is ineffective for treating women who already have the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis, researchers report. The study found the hormone calcitriol failed to increase bone mass among a group of 72 post-menopausal women with osteoporosis. "The goal of treatment of post-menopausal osteoporosis is to prevent further fractures," said Drs.

Most Americans don't consume enough calcium to protect themselves from the bone-weakening disease osteoporosis, the National Academy of Science warned last summer when it increased the recommended intake of the mineral from 1,000 to 1,300 milligrams per day. But calcium consumption is just part of the picture for preventing and treating this debilitating disease, which affects more than 28 million Americans, 80% of them women.

Calcium is important for bone health, but medical experts have long debated how much calcium people should consume to reduce the risk of osteoporosis later in life. A new study suggests that the U.S. recommendation for adult women may be unnecessarily high. The recommended dietary allowance for women ages 51 and older in the United States is 1,200 milligrams a day --  compared with the recommendation in the United Kingdom of 700 milligrams per day. The new study, published online Tuesday in the British Medical Journal , suggests that consuming more than 700 mg a day won't help.

Calcium supplements appear to slightly raise the risk of heart attack, a new analysis suggests. But the data, from postmenopausal women who took supplements over seven years, are far from conclusive. So don’t throw out the multivitamins just yet – or those calcium supplements that many women take for bone health. Not all doctors are convinced that this study, led by the University of Auckland, is the last word on calcium supplements. Or that it changes the debate at all. The results from previous studies of calcium and heart attack risk, including ones from the same research team, have been widely criticized.

A team of Harvard researchers may have discovered a new way to ward off the red, itchy rash caused by allergies to nickel.  All it takes is a dab of topical cream, according to research published online Sunday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Thirty million to 45 million people -- more than 10% of the U.S. population -- are sensitive to nickel found in common objects including jewelry and coins, the paper reported.  Among the sufferers: study lead author Jeffrey M. Karp of Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a nanoparticles specialist who sought a way to treat the irritating allergy.

Calcium channel blockers prescribed to lower blood pressure and macrolide antibiotics to treat infections can combine to sharply reduce blood pressure in the elderly, leading to an increased risk of hospitalization and other problems, Canadian researchers reported Monday. The combination of drugs probably reduces blood pressure in younger patients as well, but represents a bigger risk in the elderly, who are already at increased risk of falls, said Dr. David Juurlink of the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, who led the study reported in the Canadian Medical Assn.

I suffer from digestive upset when taking antibiotics, and I'd like to counter that with the probiotic bacteria in yogurt. Does taking antibiotics with yogurt affect absorption of antibiotics? It depends to a certain extent on the antibiotic, but many should not be taken within a few hours of yogurt or other calcium-rich foods. That includes antibiotics in the tetracycline family and drugs such as ciprofloxacin and norfloxacin, but not ofloxacin. Fruit juice fortified with calcium also can interfere with antibiotic absorption.

The Institute of Medicine recently upended the health apple cart with a new study that says we don't need as much calcium or vitamin D as we've been told. In fact, taking the kind of megadose that makes you feel virtuous and keeps the supplement industry healthy can lead to kidney stones, with calcium, and kidney or heart damage, with D. If that sounds alarmist, let me quote directly from the Institute of Medicine's statement, which says that "some signals suggest there are greater risks of death and chronic disease associated with long-term high vitamin D intake.

Just about the time girls get their braces off and start worrying about how their jeans fit, they also stop drinking milk. Although calcium intake in childhood and adolescence is crucial to long-term bone health, few teenagers find this bone-protection message convincing enough to add dairy products to their diet. Surveys show most teen girls get only about half of the recommended 1,500 milligrams of calcium per day.

Women who get calcium from food have higher bone density than those who get calcium from supplements, a study has found. This is true even if the supplements contain more total calcium than the diet with which they are compared. In the study published in the May edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis had 168 post-menopausal women keep a weeklong dietary record.

You're trying to do your bones a favor when you pop your daily calcium pill. And doctors who recommend the pills are trying to do patients a favor too. What then, to make of a suggested link between daily calcium supplements and a slightly increased risk of heart attacks? The findings, announced in July and noted in last week's Institute of Medicine report on vitamin D and calcium, caused concern among patients and some doctors alike. But many physicians say that the research needs to be confirmed before people start tossing away their calcium pills.

A team of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine sought Tuesday to douse growing concerns that North Americans are deficient in two key nutrients ? calcium and vitamin D ? and that they risk higher rates of a wide range of chronic diseases and cancers as a result. The panel concluded that "with few exceptions, all North Americans are receiving enough calcium and vitamin D" from the foods they eat ? many of which have been fortified with both nutrients. For all but a few, adding more of those nutrients in pill form would be useless at best and, at worst, would risk harm, added the report, which was two years in the making.