No, vitamin D pills won't help with fractured bones if you have osteoporosis

The idea made so much sense it was almost unquestioningly accepted: Vitamin D pills can protect bones from fractures. After all, the body needs the vitamin for the gut to absorb calcium, which bones need to grow and stay healthy.

But now, in the first large randomized controlled study in the United States, funded by the federal government, researchers report that vitamin D pills taken with or without calcium have no effect on bone fracture rates. The results, published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, hold for people with osteoporosis and even those whose blood tests deemed them vitamin D deficient.

These results followed other conclusions from the same study that found no support for a long list of purported benefits of vitamin D supplements.


So, for the millions of peopl who take vitamin D supplements and the labs that do more than 10 million vitamin D tests each year, an editorial published along with the paper has some advice: Stop.

"Providers should stop screening for 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels or recommending vitamin D supplements and people should stop taking vitamin D supplements in order to prevent major diseases or extend life," wrote Dr. Steven R. Cummings, a research scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, and Dr. Clifford Rosen, a senior scientist at the Maine Medical Research Institute.

There are exceptions, they say: People with conditions such as celiac or Crohn's disease need vitamin D supplements, as do those who live in conditions where they are deprived of sunshine and may not get any of the mineral from foods that are routinely supplemented with vitamin D, such as cereals and dairy products.

Getting into such a severe vitamin D-deprived state is "very hard to do in the general population," Cummings said.

The two scientists know that in making such strong statements they are taking on vitamin sellers, testing labs and advocates who have claimed that taking vitamin D, often in huge amounts, can cure or prevent a wide variety of ailments.

The study involved 25,871 participants - men aged 50 and older and women 55 and older - who were assigned to take 2,000 international units of vitamin D each day or a placebo.