A clinical trial that followed 14,641 doctors for over a decade has found those who took multivitamins were 8 percent less likely to get cancer but ACSH is very skeptical about this study, for reasons we ll get to later.
Researchers led by Dr. J. Michael Gaziano, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women s Hospital, gave the doctors all men over 50 either Pfizer Inc. s Centrum Silver or a placebo pill, and followed them from 1997 through 2011. Those who took the multivitamin had a statistically significant reduction in the incidence of total cancer, although there was no difference in cancer mortality, according to the study published in JAMA.
While it was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled prospective study the so-called gold standard of epidemiologic studies the researchers fail to posit a biological hypothesis for how a multivitamin could reduce cancer across the board. And how could there be, when what we call cancer is in fact a number of different diseases with different etiologies, or causes; it s hard to believe a multivitamin could reduce all of them, explains ACSH s Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. It s just incredible that no one questioned this the idea of cancer being a single disease, she says.
This study appears to be designed solely to produce headlines, scoffs ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross. Why would a scientific group try to apply some intervention to seek a reduction in cancer, knowing that there are so many different types, and even within one type there are so many genetic variations. And, when they couldn t find one cancer whose incidence was reduced significantly, they combined them all to arrive at a statistical triumph.
When you look at the actual data from the study, says ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom, it just doesn t add up. The differences between the vitamin and control groups are small, in fact often statistically insignificant. I m not impressed.