According to a news release from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, researchers discovered that the risk of dying from invasive breast cancer was 30 percent lower among multivitamin users compared with nonusers.

“Our study offers tentative but intriguing evidence that multivitamin/mineral supplements may help older women who develop invasive breast cancer survive their disease,” said lead author Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Ph.D., distinguished university professor emerita of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

Multivitamin pills contain 20-30 vitamins and minerals, typically at levels of 100 percent of U.S. Recommend Dietary Allowances or less.

The research was part of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Clinical Trials and the WHI Observational Study. The study included data from more than 161,000 postmenopausal women.

The study concentrated on 7,728 participants who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer during the WHI and were followed for an average of seven years after their diagnoses. Invasive breast cancer is cancer that has moved outside the membrane of the milk glands or ducts and into the breast tissue.

During the WHI and follow-up meetings, participants gave information about their health including whether or not they had taken a multivitamin pill at least once a week during the prior two weeks.

Approximately 38 percent of the 7,728 women who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer during the WHI were utilizing the pills. A comparison of death rates showed that women with invasive breast cancer who took multivitamin pills were 30 percent less likely to die from their cancers than women with the same cancer who hadn’t taken the pills.

The researchers found that the link between multivitamin use and lowered risk of death carried on even after education, race/ethnicity, smoking status, weight, depression, alcohol use, physical activity, age at diagnosis and diabetes were taken in consideration.

“Controlling for these other factors strengthens our confidence that the association we observed – between taking multivitamin/mineral supplements and lowering breast-cancer mortality risk among postmenopausal women with invasive breast cancer – is a real one,” said Dr. Wassertheil-Smoller, who holds the Dorothy and William Manealoff Foundation and Molly Rosen Chair in Social Medicine Emerita. “But further studies are needed to confirm whether there truly is a cause-and-effect relationship here. And our findings certainly cannot be generalized to premenopausal women diagnosed with invasive cancer or to other populations of women.”

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