What Your Heart Health Means For Fracture Risk

No, not your risk of a broken heart, but more about its association with bone health and a 93% increased risk of osteoporosis incident fractures:

When your calcium’s in entirely the wrong place

Consider the following:

• You want plenty of calcium in your bones, because that’s one of the (several!) important ingredients for making bones strong.
• You do not want plenty of calcium lining your arteries, because that’s one of the (several!) important ingredients of atherosclerotic plaque.

So, should you get more calcium or less? The crux lies in how your body directs it!

We talk about one of the critical factors in the “learn more” section below (most people don’t know that vitamin K2 is essential for this, and many people have a dietary vitamin K deficiency, because it’s not a vitamin most people think about much.).

Other vitamins are important too, and most people know that vitamin D is a relevant one, but watch out:

• Vitamin D2 vs Vitamin D3: What You Would Benefit From Knowing
• Vit D + Calcium: Too Much Of A Good Thing? ← this also talks about safe and effective doses, and what goes wrong if you take too much
• How Taking Vitamin D Supplements Can Sabotage Your Vitamin D Levels

Hormones are another thing that’s absolutely critical. For women, estrogen (specifically, estradiol) and progesterone are essential for healthy bone turnover. For men, testosterone does the job, but for menopausal women, it usually becomes necessary to supplement with HRT.

For more on that, see:

• The Bare-Bones Truth About Osteoporosis
• Cancer & HRT: What’s Safe? ← for those worried about this; the risks are real for some people with some kinds of HRT, but greatly exaggerated by the press
• The HRT That Prevents Osteoporosis Without Side Effects

So, what does heart health have to do with this?

For a start, there’s a clear relationship between “calcium levels in arteries” and “calcium levels in bones”, and the simplest version is “what gets stuck in the arteries doesn’t make it into the bones”.

So, cardiovascular health becomes critical for bone health.

All so recently (paper published last week, at the time of writing) researchers (Dr. Rafeka Hossain et al.) found that higher cardiovascular risk (measured using the PREVENT risk calculator that we talked about here: What The New Cholesterol Guidelines Mean For You) was linked to higher risks of major osteoporotic and hip fractures in postmenopausal women.

And not a small difference, either: of the 21,300 participants, women in the high CVD risk group had a 93% higher risk of hip fracture compared with low-risk women!

And yes, there was a dose-response effect: fracture risk increased commensurately from borderline to intermediate to high cardiovascular risk.

There are some factors where it’s not that one thing causes the other, but rather they’re both caused by the same thing, e.g. postmenopausal hormonal changes, especially declining estrogen, contribute to both cardiovascular risk and bone loss simultaneously.

There are also some that are more causal in nature, e.g. shared biological pathways passing on chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, impaired calcium regulation, and even reduced blood flow from atherosclerosis itself.

You can read Dr. Hossain’s paper here: The association between 10-year cardiovascular risk and fracture incidence in postmenopausal women: a prospective analysis from the Women’s Health Initiative

Want to learn more?

You might like this book we reviewed a while back:

Vitamin K2 And The Calcium Paradox – by Kate Rhéaume-Bleue ← you may be wondering whether this is somehow 288 pages to say “take vitamin K2”. And, it somewhat is, but there are a lot of details when it comes to things that have historically raised or lowered the amount of vitamin K2 in our diet, what can be done about it in dietary terms if preferring to go all-natural (hint: nattō is an excellent option, but far from the only one), and what other effects vitamin K2 (or its deficiency) can have on us, in many of the body’s systems, far beyond just bone health (and including things as varied as fertility and avoidance of Alzheimer’s).

Take care!