Can A Multivitamin Really Reduce The Risk Of Cardiovascular Disease?

There are several risk factors for cardiovascular disease including older in age, if you are a male and if you have a history of cardiovascular disease.  

Other major risk factors are cigarette smoking, high cholesterol and hypertension.  

Of course there are the smaller factors that are still risk factors but don't seem to play as significant of a role in regards to increasing your risk.  

Needless to say there are more than a dozen risk factors if not two dozen risk factors that may increase your risk for some type of cardiovascular disease.  

A recent research study was conducted with women and they wanted to study the effects of taking a multivitamin and their risk for a heart attack.  This study included 31,671 women without any history of cardiovascular disease and 2,262 women with a history of CVD.  

The women ranged in age from 49-83 years old.  The women who participated completed a questionnaire regarding their use of dietary supplements, how they diet was and other lifestyle factors so that the researchers could compile this data to analyze patterns, trends, etc.  

They followed up with these women on average for 10 years and found that there were 932 cases of heart attacks in the no history of cardiovascular disease group and 269 heart attacks reported in the group with a history of cardiovascular disease.  

The results also showed that in the women who had no history of CVD the use of a multivitamin alone was associated with a 27% reduction in risk for a heart attack compared to those who did not take any multivitamin.  

They also found that those who took a multivitamin with other supplements reduced their risk by 30%.  

Long term use which mean over five years revealed a stronger link with lowering the risk of a heart attack.  

Unfortunately they did find that those women with a history of cardiovascular disease did not reduce their risk for a heart attack by supplementing with a multivitamin.  

What this study does show though is that if you follow the proper steps to reducing your risk of  cardiovascular disease by not smoking, eating right, and don't have a family history of CVD you may be able to reduce that risk even further by supplementing with a multivitamin.

If you don't already take a daily multivitamin you might want to start taking one right away. 

Resource:
Rautiainen S, Akesson A, Levitan EB, et al. Multivitamin use and the risk of myocardial infarction: a population-based cohort of Swedish women. Am J Clin Nutr. Sep2010.