Vitamin D supplementation and risk of falling: outcomes from the randomized, placebo-controlled D-Health Trial.

What Was Tested

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

Falls cause considerable morbidity and mortality in older people.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 2015, participants taking part.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were older adults.

Each year, the researchers collected blood samples from ~450 randomly sampled participants from each trial arm and measured 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D].

Falls, a prespecified tertiary outcome, were ascertained using annual surveys and, for a subset of participants, 3-month falls diaries.

How the Study Was Run

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

The participants 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 participants 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 researchers used data from the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled D-Health Trial conducted in Australia.

The primary outcome for this analysis was any fall in the month before completing an annual survey.

As part of their process to maintain blinding, the researchers used random samples of participants (surveys, n = 16 000; diaries, n = 2400), with equal numbers per group.

Participants with no outcome data were excluded.

Following an intention-to-treat approach, the researchers analysed outcomes using logistic, ordinal and negative binomial regression.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Accidental Falls, Australia, Dietary Supplements, Vitamin D and Vitamins.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Randomized controlled trial.

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 2015, participants.

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

Its findings take up roughly 9 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2021 (Journal of cachexia, sarcopenia and muscle), a journal based in Germany.

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