Vitamin D may help prevent falls

It's been considered an almost inevitable part of aging, but falling -- something nearly a third of all Americans over age 65 do at least once a year -- may be preventable.

Research now has shown that vitamin D supplements can help avert falls before they happen.

Among older people, falls can be serious, causing some 11,600 deaths a year, most of them in people 75 and older who suffer hip fractures.

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble compound found in foods like salmon, tuna, eggs and liver and in fortified dairy, juice and cereal products. Vitamin D also can be produced by the body after exposure to the sun, which triggers synthesis in the skin. Most people get the majority of their daily intake of vitamin D through sunshine.

Vitamin D helps maintain bone health by promoting calcium absorption and by helping with bone mineralization. In fact, Dr. Heike Bischoff-Ferrari, a visiting scientist at Tufts University , told HealthDay , previous studies have shown that vitamin D reduces the number of fractures caused by falls because of its bone-strengthening properties.

But it may do more.

"The new insight that we try to show in this study is that vitamin D reduces the risk of falling by affecting muscle strength favorably," she said.

Bischoff-Ferrari and her team of researchers studied the incidence of falls in more than 1,200 healthy older people who took either a vitamin D supplement, calcium or a placebo under carefully controlled conditions. They found that the vitamin D supplements reduced the risk of falls among participants by more than 20 percent.

"We observed that the number of persons who took vitamin D who fell was smaller than those who took only calcium or a placebo," Bischoff-Ferrari said.

The team found the tipping point for reducing falls required a daily dose of 800 milligrams. The frequency of falls was not reduced in people who took 400 units a day of vitamin D, she noted.

The findings were first published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association .

Bischoff-Ferrari recommended that most people not rely on food and sun to fulfill their daily vitamin D needs. Instead, vitamin supplements should be added to the diet in order to get the recommended dose.