Vitamin D Pills Don’t Prevent Bone Fractures, Osteoporosis: Study

A large trial adds to a growing list of conditions once thought to be helped by vitamin D supplementation.

Written byDan Robitzski

| 2 min read

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Vitamin D supplements have long been touted as offering myriad health benefits, including protecting against cognitive decline, cancer, and bone fractures, and even increasing one’s lifespan. But research published today (July 28) in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) concludes that high-dose vitamin D pills offer no protection against bone fractures or osteoporosis in middle-aged and older adults, regardless of factors such as sex, age, and race.

“The takeaway is that in general, people shouldn’t be popping vitamins left and right and if you’re trying to prevent fractures, vitamin D alone is not enough,” Columbia University Medical Center endocrinologist Ethel Siris tells NBC.

The research comes in the form of an ancillary study to the Vitamin D and Omega-3 Trial (VITAL), which recruited nearly 26,000 participants—all either men over the age of 50 or women over 55 from the US—to measure the effects of vitamin D supplementation against a ...

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Meet the Author

Dan Robitzski
Dan is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles who joined The Scientist as a reporter and editor in 2021. Ironically, Dan’s undergraduate degree and brief career in neuroscience inspired him to write about research rather than conduct it, culminating in him earning a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University in 2017. In 2018, an Undark feature Dan and colleagues began at NYU on a questionable drug approval decision at the FDA won first place in the student category of the Association of Health Care Journalists' Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Now, Dan writes and edits stories on all aspects of the life sciences for the online news desk, and he oversees the “The Literature” and “Modus Operandi” sections of the monthly TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. Read more of his work at danrobitzski.com.
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