MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Susanne Rautiainen, PhD From the Department of Institute of Environmental Medicine Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden Divisions of Preventive Medicine  Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Rautiainen: Multivitamins are the most commonly used dietary supplement in the US and other developed countries and it has been shown that many take them with the goal of maintaining or improving their health. Multivitamins typically provide low-doses of essential vitamins and minerals to prevent deficiency. Yet many people who take multivitamins are not deficient. Despite the widespread use, limited number of studies have investigated how multivitamins are associated with major chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease. We therefore examined how self-reported multivitamin use was associated with both short- and long-term risk of cardiovascular diseases in the Women’s Health Study which is a prospective cohort of 37,193 women aged ≥45 years and free of CVD and cancer at baseline. In this study of middle-aged and elderly women who were apparently healthy at baseline and followed for an average of 16.2 years, we observed that multivitamin use was not associated with neither short- nor long-term risk risk of major CVD events, including MI, stroke, or CVD death. Moreover, there was no significant association observed for women who had taken multivitamins for ≥10 years at baseline. There were some important indications that the association between multivitamin use and long-term risk of major CVD events may be modified by age and fruit and vegetable intake, suggesting that women who were older and had low fruit and vegetable intake may benefit more from multivitamin supplement use. However, these results should be interpreted with caution. Moreover, relying on self-reports of multivitamin use may be subject to misclassification, plus other unmeasured factors may have biased the results despite our best effort to account for everything. (more…)