Taking multivitamins daily was associated with changes in epigenetic ageing ‘clocks’.Credit: Halfpoint Images/Getty
Taking a multivitamin every day can slow certain markers of biological ageing, a new study suggests.
The research, published in Nature Medicine on 9 March1, reveals that taking a daily supplement for two years slowed biological ageing in older adults by around four months, compared with those who didn’t take them.
The effect was more pronounced in people who already showed signs of accelerated biological ageing, meaning that their calculated biological age was greater than their chronological age.
The aim of studies like this is “not just identifying how to live longer, but also how to live better”, says study co-author Howard Sesso, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Although it’s too early to link the data to clinical outcomes, “the multivitamin intervention appeared to be on that type of trajectory over two years,” he says.
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“This is a very interesting and rigorous study,” says Steve Horvath, a geroscientist at biotechnology company Altos Labs in Cambridge, UK. “The public appetite for knowing whether everyday supplements can genuinely slow ageing is enormous. This study provides some of the most credible evidence we have to date.”
Slowing down the clock
Sesso and his colleagues analysed blood samples from 958 healthy participants in the COSMOS study, a randomized controlled trial in the United States, who were 70 years old on average. The samples were taken at three time points: when they enrolled in the study and after 12 and 24 months.
To calculate people’s biological ages at the time of each sample, the team analysed five epigenetic ‘clocks’ in the blood samples. These clocks are biomarkers that measure DNA methylation — patterns of molecular tags on DNA — at specific sites in the genome. Methylation levels increase or decrease at particular sites in a relatively predictable manner with age.
The researchers found that taking a daily multivitamin significantly slowed markers of ageing in two of the five clocks — both of which can be used to indicate mortality risk.
The beneficial effect of daily multivitamins on biological ageing markers is small, but “this kind of consistency across different epigenetic clocks is exactly what you want to see”, says Horvath, who developed one of the clocks used.
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