Vitamin use not recommended for older women

Taking some vitamin supplements later in life can't be recommended for older women because they may do more harm than good, according to a new study.

For the study in this week's Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers followed a group of 38,772 women in their 60s in Iowa for about 20 years. Taking multivitamins, folic acid and especially iron supplements were associated with a higher mortality risk, the researchers found.

Use of multivitamins was associated with an absolute risk increase of 2.4 per cent, Jaakko Mursu of the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio, Finland, and co-authors reported.

In contrast, calcium was associated with a lower mortality rate.

Participants in the study filled in questionnaires about their use of supplements three times during the study period. By 2004, 85.1 per cent of women said they took at least one supplement daily.

The most commonly used supplements were:

* Calcium.
* Multivitamins.
* Vitamin C.
* Vitamin E.

Supplement users were more likely to have a poorer quality diet overall, with a lower intake of energy, total fat, and saturated fatty acids, the researchers found.

"Although we cannot rule out benefits of supplements, such as improved quality of life, our study raises a concern regarding their long-term safety," the study's authors concluded.

"Based on existing evidence, we see little justification for the general and widespread use of dietary supplements. We recommend that they be used with strong medically based cause, such as symptomatic nutrient deficiency disease."

The study included a large sample that was followed for a long period of time.

Vitamins Do Older Women Little Good In yet another blow to the dietary supplement industry, researchers find no evidence that multivitamin use helps older women ward off heart disease and cancer, the top two killers of women, respectively.

"Women can be encouraged by the fact that these vitamins seem to do no harm, but they also seem to confer no benefit," said study co-author Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, a professor of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. "The kind of vitamins you get from diet is quite different, because foods are very complex and have a lot of chemicals we don't know about that interact with each other. [Eating a varied diet] is not the same as distilling it into a pill. The message is to eat a well-balanced diet, exercise and maintain weight."

Other recent studies have suggested that supplement forms of vitamins B, C, D and E, along with folic acid and beta carotene, don't seem to have cancer-fighting abilities, especially in women.

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