Different calcium supplements proven to not affect CVD

A new report recently published has disproved the link between taking different calcium supplements and developing cardiovascular disease. This includes those supplements that are with or without vitamin D.

According to a medical blog, the paper comes from research of over half a million individuals.

“Calcium supplements with and without vitamin D have again been shown not to adversely affect cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes in men or women between 40 and 69 years of age. The latest analysis to examine this issue includes data from more than half a million individuals.

“Historically, the only side effects of calcium supplementation were an increased risk of indigestion and a very small increased risk of kidney stones, but in recent years, there has been a suggestion from a small number of researchers that calcium supplementation might lead to an increased risk of heart attacks,” lead author Nicholas Harvey, MD, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, told Medscape Medical News in an email.

“Using the UK Biobank cohort, we had the opportunity to examine this issue in 500,000 UK men and women in middle to older age, and our results suggest that calcium supplementation ― with or without vitamin D supplementation ― does not increase the risk of cardiovascular events.”

This has come after years of debate over the true side effects of taking calcium. While its benefits were widely known, there were some sceptics who ran tests linking taking supplements to heart disease – particularly in women.

In the UK Biobank study, researchers found that 34,890 participants reported taking calcium supplements and that 20,004 were taking vitamin D supplements. Only 2.1% of the group overall were taking both.

In both crude and adjusted analyses for all possible confounders, “There were no associations between use of calcium supplements and risk of incident hospital admission with ischemic heart disease, any cardiovascular event, or death following either admission category,” Dr Harvey reported.