Multivitamins Don't Help the Heart Even in People with Poor Nutrition

This article is a collaboration between MedPage Today and:

Long-term daily multivitamin use didn't reduce risk of cardiovascular events in middle-age and older men regardless of their baseline nutrition status, an analysis of the Physicians' Health Study II showed.

In the analysis of 13,316 male physicians ages 50 and older who completed a baseline semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire (91.0% of the original trial), reported intake of various foods, nutrients, dietary patterns, and baseline supplement use did not consistently influence the effect of multivitamin use on cardiovascular disease (CVD) endpoints.

There were some statistically significant treatment interaction effects with vitamin B6 intake on MI, vitamin D intake on CVD mortality, and vitamin B12 intake on CVD mortality and total mortality.

"However, there were inconsistent patterns in hazard ratios across tertiles of each dietary factor that are likely explained by multiple testing," Howard D. Sesso, ScD, MPH, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard in Boston, and colleagues reported online in JAMA Cardiology.

An accompanying editorial by Linda Van Horn, PhD, RD, of Northwestern University in Chicago, noted that similar conclusions have emerged from the few other studies that considered baseline diet as possibly affecting nutrition status.

"A collaborative effort to help make healthy food intake a priority for most Americans could offer unsurpassed and less expensive public health benefits for all," she concluded.

The researchers noted that the ongoing COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (COSMOS) trial, "which is testing a multivitamin supplement with 4 years of treatment and follow-up, will provide further context of its role in CVD prevention among older women and older men, including potential effect modification by baseline nutritional status."