America's favorite dietary supplements, multivitamins, modestly lowered the risk for cancer in healthy male doctors who took them for more than a decade, the first large study to test these pills has found.
The result is a surprise because many studies of individual vitamins have found they don't help prevent chronic diseases and some even seemed to raise the risk of cancer.
In the new study, multivitamins cut the chance of developing cancer by 8 percent. That is less effective than a good diet, exercise and not smoking, each of which can lower cancer risk by 20 percent to 30 percent, experts say.
Multivitamins also may have different results in women, younger men or people less healthy than those in this study.
"It's a very mild effect and personally I'm not sure it's significant enough to recommend to anyone," said Dr. Ernest Hawk, vice president of cancer prevention at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and formerly of the National Cancer Institute.
"At least this doesn't suggest a harm" as some previous studies on single vitamins have, he said.
The study was presented Wednesday in Anaheim, Calif., at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research and published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Led by Dr. J. Michael Gaziano, of Brigham and Women's Hospital and VA Boston, the study followed some 15,000 male doctors who were 50 or older and free of cancer when it started. They were given monthly packets of Centrum Silver or fake multivitamins without knowing which type they received.
After about 11 years, the doctors in the vitamin group had an 8 percent lower risk of cancer than those taking the placebo.
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