[Effect of calcium and vitamin D in the reduction of falls in the elderly: a randomized trial versus placebo].

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 508 patients taking part.

PubMed indexes the participants as older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

A total of 508 patients were selected from 35 Family Medicine consultations.

The treatment was administered to 398 subjects (Ca/VitD 188 and placebo 210).

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The patients were allocated by chance, so the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Neither the patients nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Accidental Falls, Calcifediol, Calcium, Hand, Hand Strength, Incidence and Muscle Strength.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Anciano, Calcio, Caídas, Elderly, Vitamin D and Vitamina D.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 508 patients.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

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 2014 (Medicina clinica), a journal based in Spain.

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