Calcium Taken in Pregnancy Doesn’t Help Blood Pressure, Study Finds
From Times staff and wire reports
Calcium supplements commonly given to pregnant women to prevent dangerously high blood pressure called preeclampsia don’t work, a surprising new government study has found. Preeclampsia afflicts about 5% of pregnant women and can be fatal to both mother and child.
In the study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors randomly assigned 4,589 healthy pregnant women to take either chewable two-gram calcium tablets or dummy look-alikes. When the study was over, 7% of the women in the calcium group had suffered preeclampsia, virtually identical to the number in the comparison group. Current guidelines recommend 1.2 grams of calcium daily during pregnancy.
