Liu, who has passed the age of old age, is an old hypertensive patient. For a long time, he has been taking calcium antagonist Nitrendipine and other antihypertensive, blood pressure control is relatively stable. However, a few days ago in the unit physical examination, he was found to suffer from osteoporosis, the doctor recommended that he pay attention to long-term calcium supplement. After he returned home from the hospital, his mind was puzzled, thinking, he has been taking calcium antagonists, and now with this calcium, the medicinal properties are not mutually antagonistic to make the effect of drugs offset? After thinking hard, he decided to ask the experts for clarification. After listening to his statement, Dr. Huang of the Department of Cardiology patiently explained: In the clinic, we often come across some hypertensive patients taking calcium antagonists to consult whether they can take calcium supplements during the period of medication. Literally people would think that calcium antagonists and calcium supplementation are contradictory. In fact, calcium and calcium antagonists, these two seemingly opposing drugs, in the body to play their pharmacological effects, not only do not conflict with each other, but also can be complementary. Why can calcium and calcium antagonists coexist peacefully in the human body? Calcium is an essential element for the human body. People consume about 100 mg of calcium per day from food, 99% of which is combined with phosphorus and deposited in the bone. Calcium has many important physiological roles, it is the most basic raw material to form human bones, and its strength is sufficient to support the human body weight and various activities of the limbs. Most of the calcium in the human body is distributed in the bones and blood, and a very small portion exists in the endothelial cells of blood vessels and cardiac muscle cells, which contain very small amounts of calcium, but have very important physiological functions. If the calcium ions in these cells increase, it will obviously cause vasoconstriction and myocardial contraction ability to strengthen, resulting in increased blood pressure. In particular, sustained vasoconstriction of small arterial vessels is a direct cause of hypertension. Calcium antagonists are effective in lowering blood pressure because they prevent extracellular calcium ions from entering the cells. However, they have no effect on the level of calcium in the blood, much less antagonize other physiological effects of calcium. Therefore, there is no contradiction between taking calcium antagonists in hypertensive patients and taking calcium supplements at the same time. In addition, calcium antagonists have a therapeutic effect on osteoporosis by inhibiting calcium intracellular flow and promoting calcium deposition in bone. Nitrendipine is one of the more commonly used drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. These drugs are pharmacologically known as calcium channel blockers, which cause moderate calcium deficiency in cells by blocking and inhibiting the entry of extracellular calcium ions into the cells, while inhibiting myocardial contractility and slowing the heart rate, relaxing the vascular smooth muscle, decreasing the blood pressure, reducing the heart load, and leading to a decrease in myocardial oxygen consumption, rather than directly antagonizing calcium. Therefore, there is no need to increase the dosage of calcium antagonists when supplementing calcium. Recently, medical research has also shown that calcium supplementation can be used as an adjunctive therapy for patients with hypertension. When the human body is deficient in calcium, the human body parathyroid hormone secretion will increase, thereby increasing the permeability of the cell membrane to calcium ions, prompting extracellular calcium ions into the cell. The increased concentration of intracellular calcium ions activates the muscle contractile system, and in the case of vascular smooth muscle cells causes vasoconstriction, leading to an increase in blood pressure. This means that a calcium deficiency may cause an increase in blood pressure, whereas with calcium supplementation, this chain reaction caused by calcium deficiency will not occur. In addition, calcium supplementation can lower the concentration of cholesterol in the blood, which helps prevent atherosclerosis and is very beneficial to people with high blood pressure. Therefore, proper calcium supplementation should also be emphasized in order to combat hypertension.