The study was conducted by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington and is published in the February 9 Online Archives of Internal Medicine.
The authors wrote that millions of postmenopausal women to take multivitamins, many of them in the hope that they will prevent chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. They decided to see if there was no evidence to support.
In a separate statement, lead author Dr. Marian L Neuhouser, associate member of the Division Public Health Sciences at the Hutchinson Center, said:
“Dietary supplements are used by more than half of all Americans, who spend more than $ 20 billion on these products each year. However, scientific evidence is insufficient in the long-term health supplements.
For the study, Neuhouser and colleagues included 161,808 women participating in the Women’s Health Initiative clinical trials: a little over 40 per cent are in trials of hormone therapy, dietary interventions and calcium and vitamin D and just under 60 per cent of them participated in the observation, the study (ie they were going about their daily lives, without intervention, and those who took multivitamins made of personal choice).
The Women’s Health Initiative is one of the largest preventive studies of the United States of its kind and aims to the most common causes of death, disability and disadvantage to the quality of life in postmenopausal women.
The researchers collected data on all participants at baseline (base) and at intervals throughout the study period. The women enrolled between 1993 and 1998 and were followed for a median of 8 years in clinical trials and 7.9 years in the observational study.
The incidence of death and disease have been recorded until 2005, including invasive breast cancer, cancers of the colon / rectum, kidney, bladder, stomach, ovary and lung. The researchers also found cases of cardiovascular diseases such as myocardial infarction (heart attack), stroke and venous thromboembolism (blood clot).