The impact of medication on vitamin D status in older individuals.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Vitamin D deficiency and polypharmacy are common in the elderly.

However, knowledge on the associations between the use of specific medicines and serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) is limited.

The aim of this study was to (better) define the associations between the use of specific medicines and serum 25(OH)D.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

Study participants were aged 65-88 years in the first cohort (n = 1301) and 55-65 years in the second cohort (n = 736).

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Two different cohorts (1995/1996 and 2002/2003) from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA) were used for cross-sectional analyses.

LASA is based on an age and sex-stratified random sample of the Dutch older population.

Serum 25(OH)D of users of several groups of medicines were compared with levels of non-users using multiple linear regression analysis.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Age Factors, Cohort Studies, Cross-Sectional Studies, Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions, Longitudinal Studies, Vitamin D and Vitamin D Deficiency.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2012 (European journal of endocrinology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.