Study Links Calcium With Heart Attacks

A new study casts a shadow on calcium, the mineral known to help keep bones strong, hearts healthy, and blood pressure controlled.

New Zealand researchers report in the journal BMJ that otherwise-healthy, post-menopausal women who took calcium supplements were about twice as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who skipped the supplements.

That finding is surprising, because previous research has shown that calcium helps improve the ratio of healthy to unhealthy cholesterol by up to 20%. Such changes are linked with a 20% to 30% reduction in so-called vascular events, including heart attacks.

"I don't know what to make of it," a professor of medicine at Creighton University in Nebraska, Robert Heaney, who has conducted numerous calcium studies, said. Dr. Heaney has agreed to collaborate with New Zealand researcher Ian Reid. "We will see," he said, "if the findings pan out."