Aritcles >Vitamins Can Help Prevent Heart Attacks

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Leo Galland, MD, 01/10/2014

A series of articles published on Dec. 17 in a prestigious medical journal, The Annals of Internal Medicine, received a lot of press because of an editorial entitled, "Enough is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements."

It's safe to say that many reporters and commentators did not actually read the studies, because the data published actually revealed the opposite, at least for heart disease and for cancer in men.

So I'm going to tell you what the results of the lead study reveal, which is very different from what's been reported.

In this study, 1,708 people who had already suffered a heart attack were given either a high dose multivitamin and mineral or a placebo and were followed for about 4.5 years. Most of them were white men between the ages of 59 and 72 with high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

Because many of the people were taking statin drugs, and extensive research has shown that statin drugs substantially reduce the risk of a second heart attack, it's important to look at the data in people not taking statins.

There were 236 people not taking statins who received a placebo pill instead of the multivitamin and mineral. Over the study period, 35 percent of them experienced a second cardiac event (heart attack, stroke, death or cardiac surgery), a frequency that would be expected in this high risk group.