The effects of vitamin D supplementation on frailty in older adults at risk for falls.

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 age groups tagged for this paper are older adults, both men and women.

The STURDY trial, a two-stage Bayesian, response-adaptive, randomized controlled trial, enrolled 688 community-dwelling adults aged ≥ 70 years with a low serum 25(OH)D level (10-29 ng/mL) and elevated fall risk.

How the Study Was Run

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

Because people in this Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

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

Data were collected at baseline, 3, 12, and 24 months.

Frailty phenotype was based on number of the following conditions: unintentional weight loss, exhaustion, slowness, low activity, and weakness (≥ 3 conditions as frail, 1 or 2 as pre-frail, and 0 as robust).

All models were adjusted for demographics, health conditions, and further stratified by baseline serum 25(OH)D level (insufficiency (20-29 ng/mL) vs. deficiency (10-19 ng/mL)).

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Bayes Theorem, Dietary Supplements, Frailty, Vitamin D, Vitamin D Deficiency and Vitamins.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Nutrition supplementation, Randomized controlled trial and Vitamin D3.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and double-blind 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 2022 (BMC geriatrics), a journal based in England.

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