Doctors slam misleading news reports on multivitamins and cancer
Health experts have criticized the recent study which lead to the sensational news headlines about multivitamins and breast cancer.
Dr Damien Downing, Medical Director the UK’s Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), a medical doctor who has practiced nutritional medicine for 25 years, called the research "childish naïveté". He also said the findings could not be applied to the general public because the study involved only less than healthy, overweight postmenopausal women taking trivial amounts of multivitamins and minerals with no data on their earlier lives when disease causation would have been initiated.
The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, was led by Dr Marian Neuhouser of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Over an 8-year period researchers followed the progression of cancer and heart disease in 161,808 postmenopausal women who were part of the US government funded Women's Health initiative. Of these women, no difference in disease outcome was found between the 42% of women, aged between 50 and 79, who took multivitamin and mineral supplements and those who did not.
Dr Robert Verkerk, executive and scientific director of the ANH, said, "Like so many of the large studies conducted to evaluate the effects of supplements, any good scientist could have predicted the result. How much more public money needs to be wasted, or do we really have a health care system where so few scientists and doctors close to the big money know anything about preventative medicine?"
The ANH has published a critique of the observational study on its website. Its criticism focused particularly on the lack of relevance of the study group to the general population, the doses of supplements used, the frequency of intake, the forms of nutrients taken, and the course of the diseases studied in relation to the time and duration of supplementation.
Dr Verkerk went on to say, "We were astonished to find that, with no reasons given, the study specifically excluded multivitamin and mineral supplements that exceeded the US RDAs which are known to be far too low to yield useful heart disease and cancer protective effects. Also any multivitamin with less than 10 nutrients was excluded from the 'stress supplements' group, and this would have included some of the highest dose, limited combination products which would have been most effective."
In its critique, the ANH argues that given that chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease have long development times and are often triggered by events in earlier life, evaluating the effects of low dose supplements in older women is a futile exercise. Many of the women would likely have been in a pre-clinical disease phase, so evaluating the effects of low dose supplements in later life while knowing virtually nothing about their lifestyle and nutrient intakes during their younger years is a classic case of "too little, too late."
The Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) is an international, non-governmental organisation, based in the UK. It was founded in 2002, and works on behalf of consumers, medical doctors, complementary health practitioners and health-product suppliers to help promote natural and sustainable healthcare through the use of 'good science and good law'.
