Kidney failure has a knack for depleting calcium in the blood. That can weaken a person’s bones and cause other problems.
To correct for a lack of calcium, roughly half of all kidney dialysis patients get vitamin D injections. Unfortunately, calcitriol–an injected form of vitamin D that physicians have been prescribing for more than 2 decades–sometimes causes calcium and phosphate concentrations in the blood to rise steeply, which can boost heart disease risk.
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