Female Beauty

A new study of 39000 women published yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine,  suggests that older women who take supplements, including multivitamins, folic acid, iron, and copper, have a slightly higher risk of dying over 20 years than those who don’t.

Nearly two-thirds of the volunteers, average age 60, were taking vitamin or mineral supplements in 1986 when the study began. By 2008, more than 40 percent of the participants had died: The study highlighted iron supplements as the most risky because the larger the dose, the greater their risk of death. High iron levels have also been associated in previous research with an increased risk of heart disease (though the researchers added that they “cannot rule out the possibility” that health conditions leading to iron deficiency — like colon cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, or severe injuries — could have necessitated the use of iron supplements and also have led to earlier deaths).

Those who took multivitamins had a 2.4 percent greater risk of death than those taking no supplements; those who took folic acid had a 6 percent higher risk, while those who took iron had a 4 percent higher risk on average. The folic acid number might have been skewed higer because not many of the women took folic acid.
Calcium supplement users, on the other hand, had about a 4 percent lower risk of death.

Vitamin D supplements, which have become incredibly popular in recent years, weren’t evaluated in the study.
Researchers took into account exercise habits, body weight, dietary habits, level of education, and smoking habits. They also accounted for diabetes , high blood pressure, and the use of hormone therapy.

Women who took supplements were generally more highly educated, thinner, exercised more, and were less likely to have diabetes or to smoke. But they were also nearly twice as likely to have taken hormone replacement therapy since back in the 1980s, HRT was considered to be protective against heart disease, strokes, and other aging ills. We now know that HRT use actually raises the risk of such diseases, which has led to a dramatic decline in use.

When all of these differences were accounted for, supplement use didn’t appear to offer any health benefits and may have had a small downside. “Based on existing evidence, we see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements,” the authors concluded. “We recommend that they be used with strong medically based cause, such as symptomatic nutrient deficiency disease.”
In other words, skip the supplements, unless your doctor tells you that you need them for a specific reason.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2011 at 5:39 am and is filed under Education, Family, Health, Lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.