Results of a new study dispute the hypothesis that calcium supplementation, with or without vitamin D, increases coronary heart disease or all-cause mortality risk in elderly women. The research was presented at the World Congress on Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases in Seville, Spain, in April.

The investigators, from centers in Australia, Denmark and the U.S., undertook a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials of calcium supplements with or without vitamin D. They searched for two primary outcomes: coronary heart disease and all-cause mortality verified by clinical review, hospital record or death certificate. The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, MEDLINE and EMBASE databases were searched from Jan. 1, 1966 to May 24, 2013 for potentially eligible studies; reference lists were checked and trial investigators were contacted where additional data was required. Eligibility criteria included randomized controlled trials of calcium supplementation with or without vitamin D with events with a mean cohort age >50 years. Trial data were combined using a random-effects meta-analysis to calculate relative risk of heart disease events in participants supplemented with calcium.

Of the 661 potentially eligible reports, 18 met the inclusion criteria, contributing information on 63,564 participants with 3,390 coronary heart disease events and 4,157 deaths from any cause. Five trials contributed coronary heart disease events with pooled relative risk (RR) for calcium of 1.02; 17 trials contributed to all-cause mortality data with pooled RR for calcium of 0.96. According to the researchers, the meta-analysis showed that calcium supplementation with or without vitamin D does not increase coronary heart disease or all-cause mortality risk in elderly women.