Daily multivitamin supplements improve memory among older adults compared with placebo, as per an online study published on May 24, in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Lok-Kin Yeung, Ph.D., from Columbia University in New York City, and colleagues examined the effect of daily multivitamin/multimineral supplementation on memory in older adults. The study involved 3,562 older individuals randomly assigned to the multivitamin or placebo.
The researchers discovered that when in comparison to placebo, taking multivitamin supplements resulted in significantly improved ModRey immediate recall after one year and over 3 years following follow-up. There were no significant correlations found between multivitamin supplementation and other outcomes of episodic memories over the span of three years, or with improvements in performance on neuropsychological tests of object recognition that are novel and executive function after three years. The effect estimated of the multivitamin treatment on performance improvement in memory was approximately 3.1 years of memory loss due to age over the placebo.
“Most elderly people are concerned about changes to their memory that come due to aging,” Yeung said in an interview. “Our findings suggest that supplementing with multivitamins could be an easy and affordable option for older people to prevent memory loss.”
