Taking a commercially available multivitamin and mineral supplement for three years led to people doing better in memory and cognitive tests compared with those taking a placebo tablet.
Taking a daily multivitamin and mineral tablet may slow the gradual cognitive decline that happens naturally as we get older.
Stewart Innes / AlamyAt the end of a three-year trial, people who had taken a commercially available multivitamin-mineral supplement had a cognitive age that was 1.8 years younger than those who took a placebo.
“It’s an eye opener,” says Laura Baker at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
All the groups did somewhat better, on average, after one and two years, while at three years, their scores roughly plateaued. This was probably because over the first two years people were becoming more familiar with how to do the tests, says Baker.
Those who took the multivitamin and mineral supplements scored slightly higher than those who took the placebo tablet, but there was no significant benefit in the flavanol group. It isn’t known which components of the multivitamin and mineral tablet were responsible.
The benefit from the multivitamin was greater in people with heart or circulatory disease, such as having had surgery to widen the blood vessels to their heart. This may be because “cardiovascular disease has significant consequences for brain health”, says Baker.
“These findings are quite promising and have the potential to have a significant impact on public health,” says Rebecca Edelmayer at the Alzheimer’s Association, a US charity. But they don’t provide good enough evidence to support recommending supplement use, as the finding needs to be confirmed in a larger group of people, she says.
Journal reference: Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, DOI: 10.1002/alz.12767