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Vitamin D is known to be good for bones, but now it seems it may also help prevent falls in older people - possibly by strengthening muscles. 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.
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