Aritcles >Vitamins Can Help Prevent Heart Attacks (cont.)

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Of the 224 people not taking statins who received the multivitamin, only 23 percent experienced a second cardiac event. That's a 34 percent reduction of cardiovascular risk associated with the multivitamin compared to the placebo, enough to reach a high level of statistical significance, which makes it unlikely that this effect is simply due to chance.

Although the study was not designed to test the effects of statins, it is possible to measure the effect of statins in this population. There were 619 people taking statins who received no multivitamin; 27 percent of them experienced a cardiac event during the study period. In other words, the effect of the multivitamin was at least as good as the effect of the statins.

The combination of a statin and the multivitamin produced no additive benefit, however. Of the 629 people who were taking statins and also received the multivitamin, 28 percent experienced a cardiac event during the study period.

This is not the first time that statins and vitamins have been shown to interact in an unfavorable way. I reviewed how vitamin E and statins interfere with each other in an earlier blogcalled "Mixing Medications and Vitamins: When It Hurts, When It Helps."

How could anyone conclude from this study that vitamins showed no benefit in preventing heart attacks?

By pooling all the results, lumping the effects in statin users and statin non-users together, so that the apparent benefits of the multivitamin and mineral shrunk and failed to be statistically significant.

This is the approach you might take if that was the result you wanted to report. The authors of this study made their bias clear when they cautioned against the use of vitamins as a substitute for statins, even though the vitamin effect was actually greater than the statin effect.