Calcium, Vitamin D Assumptions Shaken

Big Study: They Don't Protect Vs. Most Bone Breaks In Older Women

(CBS)  The latest news about calcium and vitamin D may not look so encouraging, but most experts say the take-home message is the same: Keep taking your pills.

The biggest study ever to examine the value of the supplements suggests they convey only limited protection against broken bones. They failed to protect against most fractures in the mostly low-risk women, but seemed to offer some benefit against hip breaks among women over 60 and those who took the pills most faithfully.

"Equally as disappointing," points out The Early Show medical correspondent Dr. Emily Senay, "there was no colorectal cancer prevention (found). And there was a lot of hope hung on there."

Senay added, "This is not the final word (on bone health benefits or protection against colorectal cancer). A lot more analysis will go on, and, certainly, a lot more discussion. I don't want people to get too confused or upset about these findings. There's going to be more to come."

The outcome could affect an enormous number of people, since an estimated 10 million Americans have break-prone bones thanks to osteoporosis. One of two women will suffer such a fracture in her lifetime.

Doctors, who have long taken the value of these supplements almost as an article of faith, tried to put the findings as positively as possible.

"We still do believe ... that maintaining an adequate calcium intake will lay the foundation for bone health," said lead author Dr. Rebecca Jackson at Ohio State University.

But some disappointment seeped out at the margins. The study is "not as ringing an endorsement of calcium as one might like," said one of the researchers, Dr. Norman Lasser at New Jersey Medical School.

The study's findings were published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. They were a long-awaited offshoot of the big national study of diet and hormone therapy known as the Women's Health Initiative.