Calcium/vitamin pills unrelated to BP

A daily dietary supplement of calcium plus vitamin D neither reduces blood pressure nor alters the risk of developing high blood pressure in older postmenopausal women. Some studies have suggested that calcium supplementation, with or without vitamin D, could help lowering the blood pressure. To study whether or not these supplements really help prevent the development of hypertension, researchers from America studied the effects of 1000 milligrams calcium plus 400 international units vitamin D3, or placebo, in 18,000 women aged between 50 and 89 years. After a follow-up of 7 years, no significant difference was found between groups in the change in blood pressure, or in the number of women who developed hypertension or pre-hypertension.The above findings indicate that shortcuts with dietary supplements cannot be substituted for encouraging people to adopt dietary patterns that have been shown to lower blood pressure and decrease the risk of hypertension.However, null findings from the current study do not represent the final answer on the benefits of calcium/vitamin D supplementation, the researchers noted because nearly half of the women already had high blood pressure prior to the study and close to a third were using blood pressure-lowering medication. Further long-term studies focusing on blood pressure as the primary outcome, are still warranted to solve this issue.

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