Vitamin or Mineral Supplements Don’t Prevent Dementia

Reduce inflammation. Eliminate toxins. Think plants not pills. Eat vegan diet. Use essential oils. Exercise an hour every day. Do Bikram Yoga. These will help you live well until you die.

I agree that this article is superficial. Just because it was reported in JAMA does not make it a good study. The NYT needs to be more skeptical and investigative of such general and sweeping conclusions. Too many doctors are still too beholden to and brainwashed by Big Pharma to give proper value to vitamins, minerals and herbs. Nothing would please the drug companies more than if they could get laws passed to prohibit the over-the-counter sales of vitamins and minerals.

This study's results are useless for a number of reasons: (1) Because it's impossible to track what did each person ate over that period of time, what medicines were taken, other supplements people took, and what part of the country they lived in, general conclusions won't hold up. (2) The study omitted supplements that do help cognition and memory: Bacopa, Gastrodin, Huperzine, and others. (3) The vitamins and minerals covered in the meta-study may or may not support cognition and memory. So, why were THEY chosen rather than iron or magnesium? On the surface, this story is news. Underneath, though, it's another study designed to question the value of nutritional supplements.

Vitamin supplements have been repeatedly shown not to do much of anything except make money for the manufacturers and give you very expensive urine. Fresh fruits and vegetables, however, have plenty of vitamins and minerals in them that are actually bio-available. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence has shown that regularly working the Times crossword puzzles does help fight dementia. Almost as effective of getting off of social media.

This article does not mention the positive outcomes of the studies that have been done and are being done on the effect(s) of nicotinamide riboside and pterostilbene in helping people to live longer and healthier.

According to this article the studies included in this meta-analysis did not even consider L-serine, D-serine or phosphatidylserine, which have been shown to be effective in both preventing and treating dementia. A meta-analysis is not the right way to estimate the effect of all vitamins and supplements as a class. What kind of medical protocol would be "just take a bunch of vitamins and supplements" without specific guidance based on the patient's symptoms and labs? The headline is highly misleading and arguably false.

Results are limited to those supplements studied.. Limited by their doses and other factors.. But failure to use "THESE" supplements by is author is misleading. ALL supplements are not included in the meta-analyses.. I do realize that dementia is harder to study due to its time course.. But, don't overgeneralize to "supplements".

We all age, and we each age in different ways and rates to other individuals. All the organs age, but at different rates in different people. Some people's hearts age faster than their brains, for others it's the brain that ages faster than the heart (or lungs, kidneys, etc.). At some point the aging process results in death. Nothing can prevent that outcome (at best we can delay it for a short while). It's in our DNA. (But note that the longer we delay death, the more dementia we see.)

Nothing prevents dementia, but many things slow cognitive decline like exercise and drinking coffee. Maybe vitamins and supplements slow the decline as well but don't prevent it?

I agree with the readers who call for this article to be modified to include reports/interviews of leaders from the 14 federally funded centers for aging doing cutting edge research in this country. There is a lot of evidence being generated that should be made available to readers so that they don't close their minds to the important role of supplements in anti-aging efforts, including participating in ongoing and future clinical trials. There seems to be an effort by some segments of the academic medical community -- eg the"less is more" campaign and recent attack on supplements in general by JAMA Internal Medicine -- that provides the wrong message. Scientists are doing important trials now to define which supplements can reverse/modify aging. To condemn those efforts with this kind of headline based on a review of old studies does your readers a disservice. In case anyone is wondering, the Chinese are forging ahead on proving scientifically what their traditional medicine practices have recommended for a long time.

Vitamin pills do not seem to be the answer, but vitamin-rich, healthy food, on the contrary, is crucial to good health and well-being. Get your vitamins from a healthy diet.

This short blurb and provocative headline are a terrible disservice to the readers of this newspaper, and I would go so far as to ask that it be retracted. First of all, you have to understand what meta-analyses can and cannot find. Second of all, the most exciting research being done in this area at the buck Institute for the Aging under the direction of dr. Dale bredesen clearly states that many, many (he first called it "the 26 holes," as in a ship or roof, that need fixing) of these nutritional deficiencies need to be addressed for dementia to (stand a chance) be reversed or its progression slowed. I seriously doubt that any of these studies looked at these issues in this systematic way. And even if some did, lumping them all together for mass analysis almost assured that important clues will be lost. Finally, blindly supplementing with vitamins, minerals, fish oils and the like can be harmful and result in unintended consequences. Iron and copper are but two common examples. Before any nutritional supplement regimen is undertaken, the proper testing for baseline levels needs to be performed-- and then repeated (obviously) periodically to see if desired levels have been achieved. Also, don't overlook (age appropriate) hormone levels!

If you have nerve damage from B12 deficiency, taking B12 especially IM can most certainly prevent further damage.

I expect better from the Times on this subject. Without looking at the causes of dementia, it is a fool's errand to report that vitamins don't prevent it. Look at what we do know - it's starting to look like inflammation is a major driver of dementia, which is exacerbated by inflammatory fats and other things we eat that are bad for us. Start looking at the huge number of prescription drugs taken for many years - the risks for dementia are real. Look at poor sleep and lack of exercise. There are also currently a lot of different substances that are looking promising in studies, such as PQQ, Acetyl-l-carnitine, phosphatidylserine, D-Ribose, and phosphatidylcholine. An interesting study was published in August of 2018 linking demyelination to dementia, in addition to the usual neurodegenerative diseases. This is huge! Please write about new developments, not stories that are not asking the right questions.

With the endless stream of food supplements with their bogus health claims pouring into the market, desperate consumers are easily gullible. Food supplements is a huge industry that desperately needs federal regulation. Just look at the ads or read the label claims. They are fake.

In addition to my more specific evidence for cocoa flavanols below, I see that others have also recently summarized this evidence in 2018. See: PMID 30513729, 30060538, and, on flavanoids generally, 29892788. See also: PMID 30413065.

We all know that "...a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." When writing these health articles, 'attention should be paid' to outliers, e.g., people who have been PRESCRIBED B-12 because of diabetes drugs' impact on memory, etc. Just one sentence could clarify these for people not immersed in medical issues but needing some help in understanding them. We really don't want people to stop medications based on a generalized study not related to the health of individuals already being treated by doctors. Thanks.

OK, after reviewing the literature, they concluded that "there is no effective vitamin or mineral supplement that a clinician can feel comfortable in recommending to prevent cognitive decline." But there is one supplement—not a vitamin or mineral supplement—for which we have a great deal of evidence: cocoa flavanols. Cocoa flavanol supplementation has demonstrated diminished cognitive decline in a dose-dependent fashion in multiple randomized controlled trials. See, in particular, PMID 22892813 and 25733639, but also 25344629 and 27088635. How does it work? Just as cocoa flavanols provide better arterial dilation in the body, they also provide better blood flow and oxygenation in the brain. See, in particular, PMID 16794461 and 25344629, but also 18728792 and 26047963. If you have older patients, you owe it to them to print out and read all of these.