Crap, crap, crap. I know too many women who take calcium supplements not to be scared by this. Man, I just wish I could make good decisions in real time so that I don't need pharmaceuticals later in life! Dementia is so very scary!
Calcium supplements are widely used to ward off age-related bone loss, but a new study suggests that for some women they also bring a significantly higher risk for dementia. Researchers in Sweden tested the memory and thinking skills of 700 older women and tracked their use of calcium supplements. Women with a history of stroke who took calcium were seven times more likely to develop dementia within five years than were women who had suffered strokes but didn’t use the supplements. Among the women with signs of cerebrovascular disease, a disorder that affects blood flow to the brain, those who took calcium were twice as likely to develop dementia as the women who didn’t. These findings don’t prove that calcium supplements increase the risk for dementia, but researchers say they warrant further investigation. “People have a tendency to assume that dietary supplements are automatically innocuous,” neurologist Marc Gordon, who was not involved in the study, tells LiveScience.com. But “high levels of supplementation as opposed to just dietary intake [of calcium] could conceivably have some deleterious effects.”
Taken from the September 9th edition of The Week Magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment