[Geno Prussakov]

Interesting report on BBC News today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6657795.stm?lsm)

"The findings indicated the risk of advanced prostate cancer is 32% higher in men who take multivitamins more than once a day compared with those who do not take them at all.

Risk of fatal prostate cancer was almost double."

"Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in men. It kills one man every hour in the UK."

Some food for thought...

[CowgirlUp]

That's a pretty alarming statistic! :errr: My dad is an absolute health nut and I can't even begin to count how many vitamins and supplements he takes a day. I think I'm going to call my daddy right now!

Thanks for posting this Geno

[ADesertRose]

My dad was just diagnosed with prostate cancer...he has probably never taken a vitamin in his life though!
It was contained in the prostate and they lasered it out, so prognosis looks good though.
Scary to think doing something thats healthy could kill you too...

[CowgirlUp]

Glad to hear he has a positive prognosis :smiling:

[login]

I saw about it on the news. A man (some dr.) commented it as there's no reason to panic, because nobody studied why those men took multi-vitamins in the first place, maybe they had a history of the cancer in their families. I don't really see how that study could be done in the first place.

[markwelch]

login wrote: > " . . . nobody studied why those men took multi-vitamins in the first place, maybe they had a history of the cancer in their families." <

There is a crucial difference between a "correlation" and a "cause." If you looked for a correlation between liver failure and "auto accidents" or "court appearances," you'd probably find that people who have had more accidents or more court appearances ARE more likely to have liver failure (and thus there is a positive correlation). But that doesn't suggest that auto accidents or court appearances caused the liver failure; instead, it would be likely that heavy drinking caused both problems.

As noted, it may be that men who have a family history of cancer are more likely to take multivitamins (and thus it is family history" that "caused" both the cancer and the multivitamin use). Or perhaps men who take multivitamins or other non-prescription supplements visit their doctors less frequently and thus are less likely to have prostate cancer detected earlier. (Perhaps the men experienced some symptom that led them to believe they should take multivitamins, and that might have been a symptom related to early prostate cancer.) Or the reverse could be true: it's possible that taking multivitamins creates some unrelated problem that leads older men to visit their doctors, where their prostate cancer is detected. (Note that many men are discovered, during the rare autopsy of an old person, to have undetected prostate cancer, but they died of some unrelated cause.) It's also possible that men who take prescription medication are statistically more likely to take multivitamins, and the real "cancer-cause" effect arises from those other medications, or from the conditions they are prescribed to treat.

Finally, even if it is established that some component in a multivitamin causes an increased risk of prostate cancer (or causes faster progression of the disease), it's possible that that same substance might reduce some other health risk equally or greater.

Of course, we all want medical researchers to keep working on this, to figure out why there is a correlation between multivitamin use and advanced prostate cancer. But I don't see this as a reason to stop taking multivitamins (though I did stop taking them when my supply ran out a couple of months ago, I will buy another big bottle soon and resume taking a daily multi-vitamin along with the 7 prescription pills I take every day.

[Leader]

Another thing of note is that they took *more than one* multivitamin a day. So, the effect could also be related to getting an unhealthy level of some vitamin that would have been okay if they just had one multi/day.

[markwelch]

I missed the "more than one" multivitamin" reference.

I carefully avoid buying "overdosed" multivitamins. While there are some valid reasons to consider taking larger doses of some specific vitamins, some multivitamin vendors are just looking for marketing hype, and they just provide super-doses of those vitamins that are cheapest to add.

For example, my doctor advised that because of one of my prescription medications, I should not take large niacin supplements. Yet some multivitamins include 3x to 20x (yes, twenty times!) the recommended minimum daily requirement for niacin and many other vitamins.