Daily Multivitamin May Slightly Lower Men's Cancer Risk
Oct-20-2012

Taking a daily multivitamin could slightly decrease men's risk of cancer, according to a large new study being presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study, conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, is based on 14,641 male doctors ages 50 and older who participated in the Physicians' Health Study II. Some of the men were randomly assigned to take a daily multivitamin between 1997 and 2011, while others were assigned not to.
By the end of the study period, 2,669 new cases of cancer had developed, of which 1,373 cases were of prostate cancer and 210 cases were of colorectal cancer.
Overall, researchers found that the men who were assigned to take a daily multivitamin had an 8 percent lower cancer occurrence compared with those who didn't take the multivitamin.
Specifically, researchers didn't find that multivitamin use had any effect on the men's prostate cancer risk (even though prostate cancer was the most common cancer to affect them on a whole). However, multivitamin use was associated with a 12 percent lower risk of developing other cancers in the study.
Researchers also found that the risk of dying from cancer was 12 percent lower among men who took the daily multivitamins, but they said that this decreased risk was not statistically significant.
"This study suggests, at least for men, that there might be benefits to taking multivitamins in terms of cancer as well," study researcher Dr. John Michael Gaziano, M.D., the chief of the Division of Aging at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in a statement. However, they did note that the observed benefits were modest, and more research is needed to see how multivitamin use impacts men over a longer period of time, as well as whether multivitamin use has any effect in women's cancer risk.

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