There is a video here for those with broadband
http://www.abc.net.au/health/minutes...m?clip=story12
Vitamin D could help prevent falls
27 May 2004
I once thought that all vitamin D was good for was your bones. But over the years, vitamin D has been associated with all sorts of things including lower rates of various cancers.
Now there's a new finding which some experts have suspected for a while.
Vitamin D may prevent falls in the elderly - yes, the falls themselves, irrespective of whether vitamin D prevents a fracture once you've hit the floor – which it probably does.
Fall prevention is important as people age, as falls cause hospitalisation, nursing home admission and death.
The theory behind vitamin D preventing falls is that it may actually strengthen muscles in its own right.
So a group in Boston brought together all the trials of vitamin D and falls and found that it
reduced the risk of a fall by about 20 per cent, and that 15 people aged around 70 needed to take vitamin D for anything up to three years for one person to avoid a fall.
Most of the research was in women so the effectiveness in men isn't known, nor is whether there should be calcium supplementation as well.
But it could be a cheap and relatively safe solution as long as you don't take huge amounts.
