Aging is something we’re all familiar with, it’s hard to avoid! So, it’s no surprise that a new randomised clinical trial is fuelling fresh interest in multivitamins after showing a modest effect on biological aging. Research over the decades on the effectiveness of multivitamins improving people’s health has been mixed, so the results are worth investigating. In this article we will look at the answer to the question, can taking a daily multivitamin slow biological aging?
Researchers at Mass General Brigham evaluated the effects of taking a daily multivitamin over the course of two years on five measures of biological aging.1
In this analysis researchers looked at 958 randomly selected healthy participants over the age of 60, with an average age of 70.
The study uses data from the COcoa Supplement Multivitamins Outcomes Study (COSMOS).
Study participants were randomised to take a daily cocoa extract and multivitamin, daily cocoa extract and placebo, placebo and multivitamin, or placebos only.
Biological aging and chronological aging are different.
When you are asked how old you are, you would answer with the time since you were born, measured in years and months – this is your chronological age. It is a risk factor for physical and cognitive function decline, chronic disease, and mortality.
Biological age captures how you are aging, based on many different measures and factors. Throughout our lives our bodies cells, tissues and organs age at different rates that can be affected by a variety of factors such as lifestyle, diet, genetics, disease, etc. Therefore, our biological age can differ to our chronological age.
For example, someone who has lived a generally healthy lifestyle will have a younger biological age than someone of the same chronological age who eats an unhealthy diet, smokes cigarettes every day, and doesn’t exercise.
Compared with the placebo only group, people in the multivitamin group had slowing in all five epigenetic clocks. For the two clocks that are predictive of mortality there was a statistically significant slowing.
Researchers estimated that the changes were equivalent to about four months less biological aging over the course of the two-year study period. They also found that people whose biological age was higher than their actual age at the start of the study benefited the most.
The results of this study are interesting and encouraging but shouldn’t be overstated. Not all the changes were statistically significant, and these changes don’t automatically translate into real world meaningful slowing to aging or improved longevity.
The results are most relevant to older adults with a biological age that is higher than their chronological age. Hey may be more likely to help people who already have some degree of nutritional insufficiency.
A randomized clinical trial of this kind on multivitamins is uncommon. It shows that a daily multivitamin may may modestly affect biological aging markers in older adults. However, multivitamins should be treated only as a supporting player in healthy aging – alongside a healthy diet, exercise, sleep, blood pressure control, and other best practices.
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