What’s a woman to do?

After years of being urged to take calcium supplements to help strengthen our bones and prevent osteoporosis, we’ve recently learned those pills may affect our hearts.

A new study, published last month in the British Medical Journal, found that those who took calcium supplements increased their risk of heart attack by 30 percent.

The report concludes that “given the modest benefits of calcium supplements on bone density and fracture prevention, a reassessment of the role of calcium supplements in the management of osteoporosis is warranted.”

The international team of researchers was led by Ian Reid of the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Among the researchers was Dr. John Baron, a professor of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth and an epidemiologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center who said he was contacted because of research he’d done looking at calcium as a preventative for colorectal cancer.

He did find, he says, that calcium can help protect against adenomas, or polyps in the colon.

But Baron, who labels the increase in risk in the British study “modest,” says women shouldn’t panic and should confer with their physicians before making changes regarding their calcium intake.

“In general, I tell my students one study does not define reality,” he cautions.

“It doesn’t tell the whole story or even the right story. Because this study combines many trials, it does have a better status, but we don’t really understand how all this might fit together.”

The New Zealand study was a meta-study, which means it gathered information from a number of other studies — in this case, 11 separate trials totalling 12,000 participants.

Dr. Margery Gass, executive director of the North American Menopause Association and a past director of the Menopause and Osteoporosis Center at the University of Cincinnati, said medical organizations do not like to respond to such findings on the basis of a single report.

“While we recognize that raises a red flag, we like to see other studies find the same results before making a change in guidelines,” she says. “They don’t know the reason or mechanism behind their findings.”

Gass said the recent report from the Women’s Health Initiative found no difference in the amount of coronary calcification in women taking calcium and Vitamin D.

“Vitamin D has been controversial because some people have gone to high doses without randomized control trials,” says Gass.

“The Institute of Medicine is supposed to be coming out with new guidelines. We don’t want people to think that if a little is good, more is better, so you need to be sure you count your food as well.”

Gass says women should be taking only the recommended amounts of calcium.

Current guidelines recommend 1,000 mg of calcium for adults younger than 50 and 1,200 for adults older than 50. Vitamin D recommendations range from 800 international units to 1,000 or 2,000 a day.

Dr. Laxmi Mehta, director of the Women’s Cardiovascular Health Clinic at the Ohio State University, said theoretically if the New Zealand study showed an increase in the risk of heart attacks, it should also have shown an increase in the risk of deaths or strokes, which it did not.

The study also didn’t incorporate Vitamin D, which many people take as part of their calcium supplements, and Mehta says it isn’t known whether the results would be the same with D.

“We know that fractures can be disabling in women and they do need adequate calcium and vitamin D in their bodies, so at this point we would advise women to get as much of their calcium as they can from their diet,” she says.

“In general, the more natural absorption is always better and the absorption of calcium is slower with food than with pills.

“As of now, there have been no guidelines that say we should stop supporting calcium supplementation.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2440 or mmoss@coxohio.com.