Healthy Discoveries: Multivitamins don't reduce diabetes risk

Healthy discoveries

Vitamins and nutritional supplements and big business in the United States, where half of Americans usually takes them to the tune of about $ 23 billion every year.


Yet the science proving health benefits to support such widespread use is often discrepant or lacking. In the case of a large NIH-backed study, which published in the journal Diabetes Care, the science indicates little benefit, at least in reducing an adult's risk of developing type 2 diabetes.


An international group of researchers from the United States and China were interested in exploring the potential benefits of regular vitamin and supplement use in lessening a person's chance of developing diabetes. Existing research had suggested that some of the same biological mechanisms involved in developing both heart disease and diabetes might be offset by antioxidant vitamins and minerals.


Researchers from the National Institutes of Health, AARP, Harvard Medical School and the Chinese Academy of Medical Science analyzed health data from 232,007 participants in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study, gathered in 1995-1996 and followed up in 2000 to see if vitamins could defend against type 2 diabetes.


This great group of older Americans, ranging from 50 to 71 years old and all diabetes-free at the start of the study, answered questions about regular vitamin and supplement use, general health, gender, age, weight, race, education, marital status and lifestyle habits such as diet, exercise, and smoking.


More than half of the participants said that routinely they took multivitamins and/or supplements and most of those routine users took them every day.


By the end of the study term in 2000, 14,130 cases of diabetes had been diagnosed among the participants.


The lead researcher, Dr. Yiqing Song of Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston and his colleagues compared the vitamin users and non-users and concluded that taking multivitamins neither increased nor reduced "future diabetes risk." after taking traditional diabetes risk factors into account.


Of note, however, was the result that users of either vitamin C or calcium had a lower risk of diabetes than non-users, they wrote.


Dr. Song told Reuters Health that those result was surprising.


"The evidence suggests a benefit but the evidence is marginal" and a more powerful clinical trial is necessary to confirm what can only be a suggestion from this observational study, he said.


"There's a chance that (calcium or vitamin C) might protect, but we do not know for sure, we need more data," he said.

If you like this article, please feed our RSS and share it now :)