Vitamin D supplementation should be routine for elderly female nursing home residents, a new study on mortality and vitamin D deficiency suggests.

In a study of 961 female nursing home residents in Austria, researcher Stefan Pilz, M.D., found that 92.8% of participants registered vitamin D levels that were below the recommended level. Additionally, researchers recorded 284 deaths among those studied after an average follow-up time of 27 months.

Pilz recommends that most nursing home female residents should receive up to 800 IU of the vitamin per day, he told Medscape Medical News.

The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.