A safe and well-liked option for assisting people in meeting their nutritional needs is multivitamins.
According to recent research from Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard in Boston, MA, and Columbia University in New York, taking a daily multivitamin may assist older persons’ memory and reduce age-related cognitive decline.
The three-year study indicated that very little gains in cognitive function persisted throughout the period.
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published the findings on May 24.
Daily Multivitamin Enhances Mental Function
In addition to the recently concluded COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study Web, or COSMOS-Web study, the new study is a second, parallel trial. The study’s main objective was to look into how multivitamins and cocoa flavanols affected memory. However, the results of the current study are limited to those of multivitamin use.
3,562 older persons were divided into one of two groups at random for the study. Over the length of the three-year trial, the first participant took Centrum Silver for Adults as a daily multivitamin. The other group consumed a placebo.
Participants’ recollections were evaluated yearly using online neuropsychological exams. The power of people’s episodic memory, or instant recall, was the main focus of the researchers’ investigation.
Participants in the study noticed a slight increase in memory after a year of taking multivitamins, which was comparable to going back in time by roughly 3.1 years.
The study’s authors found that those with underlying cardiovascular illness had the greatest improvements in memory. Although the cause of this is unclear, the researchers believe it may be related to an underlying nutrient shortage.
Multivitamins may help slow age-related memory loss, study shows
The Need of More Long-Term Research
Dr. Manson clarified that the study’s findings are particularly convincing because they offer the data from two different studies at the same time.
In the short, three-year term, both studies revealed that multivitamins delayed cognitive decline.
There are few long-term randomised controlled trials, according to Matthew Pase, PhD, associate professor at the Turner Institute at Monash University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. He also noted that “boosting cognition in the short term is rather different from preventing cognitive decline in the long term.”
According to Dr. Fernando Testai, professor of neurology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-author of the study, previous “studies examining the preventive effects of vitamin and mineral supplementation on cognitive decline have produced inconsistent outcomes.”
How do multivitamins improve memory?
The study does not specifically address which vitamins in the multivitamin supported memory.
“Multivitamins contain more than 20 essential vitamins and minerals, and the specific micronutrient conferring cognitive benefits cannot be determined when a combination tablet is administered,” said Dr. Manson.
Dr. Pase pointed out that a multivitamin could benefit two people if one person is deficient in one vitamin and the other person is deficient in another vitamin.
Dr. Testai put out a few ideas as to what it might be about multivitamins that benefited the study subjects.
According to him, “the deficiency of several vitamins and minerals, including B vitamins, vitamin D, zinc, and iron, has been associated with cognitive decline,” adding that studies have suggested vitamin E may have neuroprotective characteristics.
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