Women who develop invasive breast cancer may benefit from taking multivitamins that contain minerals, according to a new study published in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.
“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. in a press release.
Researchers found the risk of dying from invasive breast cancer was reduced by 30 percent among multivitamin/mineral users compared to non-users.
Multivitamin/mineral supplements are the most commonly consumed dietary supplements among American adults. Typically these types of daily supplements contain 20 to 30 vitamins and minerals.
Researchers analyzed two studies that included data from 161,608 postmenopausal women ages 50 to 79. All of the women were enrolled at 40 clinical centers throughout the U.S. during the years 1993-1998.
In this study, researchers only focused on 7,728 participants who were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. On average, each participant was followed for seven years after their diagnosis.
They also looked at other factors such as smoking status, education, race/ethnicity, weight, depression, alcohol use, physical activity, age at breast cancer diagnosis, and diabetes.
“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 Wassertheil-Smoller.
Invasive breast cancer is defined as cancer that has spread outside the membrane of the milk glands or ducts and into the breast tissue.
“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,” said Wassertheil-Smoller.