Calcium supplements could help post-menopausal women combat osteoporosis, report researchers from New Zealand in a recent issue of The American Journal of Medicine.
Scientists at the Department of Medicine, University of Auckland, New Zealand, recently funded a study to determine the effect of supplementation with calcium citrate on circulating lipid concentrations in normal older women.
Lead researcher Ian R. Reid and colleagues randomly assigned 223 post-menopausal women who were not receiving therapy for hyperlipidemia or osteoporosis to receive calcium supplements or a placebo for one year.
One hundred and eleven women took one gram of calcium per day and 112 women were in the control group.
Fasting serum lipid concentrations - including high-density lipoprotein (HDL, 'good') cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL, 'bad') cholesterol - were obtained at baseline and at two months, six months and one year into the study.
At the study's completion, HDL cholesterol levels and the HDL:LDL cholesterol ratio had increased more in the calcium group than in the placebo group. This was largely due to a 7 per cent increase in HDL cholesterol levels in the calcium group. LDL levels declined a non-significant 6 per cent. There was no significant treatment effect on triglyceride levels.
The researchers concluded that calcium citrate supplementation can cause beneficial changes in circulating lipids in post-menopausal women.
"This suggests that a reappraisal of the indications for calcium supplementation is necessary, and that its cost effectiveness may have been underestimated,"they wrote in The American Journal of Medicine.