New York, February 10: A daily dose of multivitamins does not help avert heart disease and cancers in postmenopausal women, the findings published in the February issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine assert. However, fortunately, they don’t increase the susceptibility to these diseases either.
As multivitamins were largely touted to possess cancer-fighting properties, the results serve a severe blow to the dietary supplement industry.
161,800 postmenopausal women were recruited for the study. While about 68,000 women confirmed daily multivitamin use, over 93,000 formed the study’s control group. The subjects were followed for about eight years to track the health effects of multivitamins.
During the follow-up span, new cases of cancers (including breast cancer, colorectal cancer, endometrial cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer), heart diseases and deaths from other factors were ascertained.
Interestingly, both groups – multivitamin users and non-users – posted similar rates of cancers, heart diseases and deaths from other factors.
Moreover, adjustments for women's age, race, BMI, physical activity, alcohol use, smoking, and other factors failed to change the results positively. Fortunately, the results didn’t change for negative too, researchers aver.
“Women can be encouraged by the fact that these vitamins seem to do no harm, but they also seem to confer no benefit," study co-author Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, marked.
Highlighting the potency of multivitamins, Andrew Shao, vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, stated, “multivitamins, like all other dietary supplements, are meant to be used as part of an overall healthy lifestyle,” but “they are not intended to be magic bullets that will assure the prevention of chronic diseases, like cancer.”
Meanwhile, the study does come with its own set of limitations. “Most of the women in the study probably did eat a fairly decent diet, meaning we don't yet necessarily know how vitamins affect women eating poorly," Wassertheil-Smoller said. "The other thing is we didn't measure other things about diet such as sense of energy and well-being."
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