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Score One for Supplements: Daily Multivitamin Shows Small Cancer Benefit

Many clinicians advocate multivitamins as an “insurance policy” against inadequate dietary intake. They say these supplements are unlikely to do harm and just might make up for dietary shortfalls that can contribute to chronic disease risk. The main problem with this ap proach, until recently, has been a lack of supporting evidence. But now new data from a large randomized trial are helping to fill the void. In the Physicians’ Health Study II (PHS II), a trial of 14, 641 male U.S. physicians who were 50 years of age or older at baseline, a daily multivitamin reduced the incidence of cancer by 8% compared with placebo during 11 years of follow-up. “Although the main reason to take multivitamins is to prevent nutritional deficiency, these data provide support for the potential use of multivitamin supplements in the prevention of cancer in middle-aged and older men,” concluded J. Michael Gaziano, MD, MPH, of Harvard Medical School and colleagues. A companion paper from the same study reported no difference in cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes between the multivitamin group and controls.