Something as simple — and cheap — as a multivitamin a day could help reduce the risk of cancer in older men, say Brigham and Women's Hospital researchers who released the findings of an exhaustive study at a cancer research conference in California today.
"The main benefit to taking a vitamin is to make up for any deficiency, but it certainly appears that there may be a modest benefit in preventing cancer in men over 50, too," said Dr. J. Michael Gaziano, the study's lead author and the head of Brigham and Women's aging division.
For 11 years, Gaziano and his team tracked the health of 15,000 male physicians, all of whom were at least 50 years old when the study began.
To determine, for the first time, if there are any long-term benefits of taking a multivitamin — something about one third of all Americans already do — researchers gave half the study participants multivitamins, and told them to take them every day. The others unknowingly received a placebo, with the same daily-dose instructions.
The doctors were told to inform the researchers if they were diagnosed with cancer, and researchers confirmed those diagnoses by checking the men's medical records.
After 10 years, Gaziano said, researcher found that the men who took daily multivitamins had an 8 percent reduction in total cancer, when compared to the placebo-taking group.
The vitamin-taking group also had fewer cancer-related deaths, the study shows.
Gaziano said the data is solid, because the participants were "excellent" when it came to complying with study rules.
They came into the study healthy too, he said.
"Only 4 percent smoked, and most did regular exercise, and about 1,300 of them had prior cancers," he said.
Now, researchers are probing the data to see if there are any links between daily multivitamins and cardiovascular disease.
"Stay tuned," Gaziano said.
