Taking a daily multivitamin supplement supports cognitive health

Key takeaways:

• Older adults who took a multivitamin had significantly better immediate recall vs. those who took placebo at 1 year.
• The multivitamin’s effect was equivalent to about 3 years of age-related memory change.

Taking a multivitamin everyday improved memory in older adults compared with placebo, according to the results of a randomized clinical trial published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Adam M. Brickman, PhD, a professor of neuropsychology at Columbia University, and colleagues wrote that maintaining cognitive abilities is critically important to older adults, but there are currently few effective strategies to slow cognitive decline.

Previous research has indicated that healthy dietary patterns can slow cognitive aging and could explain some degree of inter-individual differences in cognitive change over time. Many older adults believe that taking dietary supplements or vitamins could also delay cognitive impairment since multivitamin supplementation is commonly used to promote general health.

Also, since vitamin supplementation is safe, accessible and relatively inexpensive, the researchers wrote that it could be a useful population health intervention.

However, it is unclear if multivitamins positively affect cognition in older age, as few larger-scale, longer-term randomized trials have rigorously tested this assumption, Brickman and colleagues wrote.

So, they conducted a study to assess the impact daily multivitamin and multimineral supplementation may have on memory in older adults.

The researchers randomly assigned 3,562 participants to placebo or Centrum Silver, a daily multivitamin supplement, and evaluated them annually for 3 years with an internet-based battery of neuropsychological tests. The primary outcome was immediate recall performance on the ModRey test or changes in episodic memory. The researchers also assessed changes in performance on neuropsychological tasks of novel object recognition and executive function over 3 years of follow up and changes in episodic memory over 3 years.

“We found that older adults randomized to take a daily multivitamin supplement had improved memory compared with a matched group randomized to take placebo after 1 year,” Brickman told Healio. “The effect was sustained, on average, after 3 years of follow-up and was stronger among individuals with a history of cardiovascular disease.”

However, multivitamin supplementation did not significantly affect executive function, memory retention or novel object recognition, according to the researchers.

Additionally, based on a cross-sectional analysis of the association between age and performance on the ModRey, the researchers estimated that the effect of the multivitamin intervention improved memory performance above placebo by the equivalent of 3.1 years of age-related memory change.

“Clinicians should consider encouraging their older patients to take a multivitamin supplement to help support cognitive health,” Brickman said. “The findings suggest an accessible and safe approach to maintaining cognitive health in older adults, a major health concern for most older people.”

Brickman emphasized that the study addressed only normal cognitive aging, “not the cognitive effects of neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.”

“We do not believe that multivitamins are an effective treatment or preventive strategy for neurodegenerative conditions,” Brickman said. “If older adults are concerned about their memory functioning, they should discuss their concerns with a clinician and seek out formal evaluation.”