Can Multivitamins Improve Memory? A New Study Shows 'Intriguing' Results: NPR
- NPR, May 26, 2023. Ed.
Americans spend billions of dollars on supplements each year, and roughly 1 in 3 adults report taking a multivitamin. But there is a debate about whether this helps promote good health. A team of researchers wanted to assess how a daily multivitamin may influence cognitive aging and memory. They tracked about 3,500 older adults who were enrolled in a randomized controlled trial. One group of participants took a placebo, and another group took a Silver Centrum multivitamin, for 3 years.
The participants also took tests, administered online, to evaluate memory. At the end of the 1st year, people taking a multivitamin showed improvements in the ability to recall words. Participants were given lists of words — some related, some not — & asked to remember as many as possible. (List-learning tests assess a person's ability to store & retrieve information.) People taking the multivitamin were able to recall about a quarter more words, which translates into remembering just a few more words, compared to the placebo group.
"We estimate that the effect of the multivitamin intervention improved memory performance above placebo by the equivalent of 3.1 years of age-related memory change," the authors write in their paper, which was published this week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And the authors point to a sustained benefit. "This is intriguing," says Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern Univ. Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. But he says the overall effect found in the study was quite small.
"It seems like a pretty modest difference," Linder says. And he points out that the multivitamins had no effect on other areas of cognition evaluated in the study, such as executive function, which may be more important measures.
Study author Dr. JoAnn Manson, who is chief of the division of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, says this is not the first study to show benefits from multivitamins. She points to a study published last year in Alzheimer's & Dementia that showed participants who took a daily multivitamin performed better, overall, on global cognitive function on tests measuring story recall, verbal fluency, digit ordering, as well as executive function. "It is surprising that such a clear signal for benefit in slowing age-related memory loss and cognitive decline was found in the study, " Manson says. "Those receiving the multivitamin did better than those receiving the placebo."...More, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/26/1178225715/can-multivitamins-improve-memory-a-new-study-shows-intriguing-results