Is Calcium Good or Bad?

How is your calcium? Is it good or bad? Does it help you or hurt you? Where
is it? Evaluating calcium in humans is a lot like evaluating a piece of real
estate: It is all about location, location, location.
First, the good places: More than 99% is in teeth, bones, or blood and intraand extracellular fluid.
Then, the bad places: soft tissues; kidneys and urinary tract; artery and vein
walls; tumors; female breasts; or as part of resolving necrosis or cellular
degeneration.
How does it get there? Calcium in, calcium out. Calcium in: maybe a
supplement of 1000 mg/day orally for an adult. Calcium out: via urine and
feces, with the retained calcium being managed by spectacular metabolic
homeostasis. It is a very delicate balance.
One of the ways that calcium appears in seemingly unwanted locations is
called "dystrophic calcification," and its presence seems relatively inert.
Can you move calcium around in the body? Maybe not moving individual
calcium moieties from place to place, but can you regulate how much of
what kind of calcium is in any one place at any one time?

Like the Blind Man and the Elephant: Point of View Matters
The nutritionists would say: This is all about diet.
The endocrinologists would say...a lot; they really know this field.
The imagers would say: I love calcium; it gives me so many fun things to
look at, measure, and analyze to try to predict importance.
The urologists would say: I can take care of your stones. We will flush them
out or pluck them out or shake them into small pieces with the lithotripter.
And by the way, here is your $30,000 bill.
The mammographers and breast surgeons would say: If I did not have
calcium flecks to find in the mammogram, I might have a really hard time
justifying biopsies.
The procedural interventionists would say: Send me your calcified arteries;
I have a stent for you.

 Big pharma would say: We have lots of drugs.

The outlier chelationists would say: We can give you some IV infusions to
get rid of all that bad stuff.
As a pathologist, I have cutor, more accurately, saweda whole lot of
bones, healthy and diseased. It is really good to have a lot of calcium as
hydroxyapatite there, in the bone. I have cut up a lot of kidneys destroyed by
stones obstructing the urinary tract. Calcium can be really bad to have there.
I have longitudinally opened or perpendicularly transected many hundreds of
large and small arteries; many normal, many diseased by narrowing; many
occluded by atherosclerotic plaque, intraplaque hemorrhage, cholesterol,
thrombus (acute, evolving, organized, or recanalized), and calcified;
sometimes very thick, hard, brittle, even rigid; and especially in arteries of
hearts, brains, necks, chests, bellies, legs. Bad.
But which came first: the chicken or the egg? Was the vascular wall calcium
an instigating progenitor, a fellow traveler as simple dystrophy, a part of the
inflammatory pathogenesis, or a culminating bony add-on for advanced
atherosclerosis? Those are really good questions.
Here's the new stuff. A large volume of alternative literature has been hyping
vitamin K as active in preventing or treating arterial calcification for years.
But serious science now seems to be backing that up. The relationship of
vitamin D, vitamin K , and calcium may hold a real key to a better
understanding of harmful arterial calcification. Check it out; keep an open
mind; stay tuned.
2

Dr George Lundberg
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/838659?
nlid=76038_1842&src=wnl_edit_medp_wir&spon=17