Women's Health Initiative clinical trials: interaction of calcium and vitamin D with hormone therapy.

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 27,347 women taking part.

PubMed indexes the participants as middle-aged adults and older adults, women only.

This is a prospective, partial-factorial, randomized, controlled, double-blind trial among Women's Health Initiative postmenopausal participants aged 50 to 79 years at 40 centers in the United States with a mean follow-up of 7.2 years.

A total of 16,089 women participated in both arms.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

Blinding on both sides kept the women and researchers unaware of who received Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc could be set against what happens without it.

The predefined outcomes were adjudicated hip fractures and measured bone mineral density.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Bone Density, Calcium, Cholecalciferol, Dietary Supplements, Drug Interactions, Drug Synergism and Estrogen Replacement Therapy.

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 27,347 women.

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

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2014 (Menopause (New York, N.Y.)), a journal based in United States.

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