A large clinical trial from Mass General Brigham suggests that taking a daily multivitamin could slow biological aging in older adults - especially those whose bodies were already aging faster than their driver's licenses suggest. The study, published in Nature Medicine, analyzed data from 958 healthy participants with an average age of 70 who were part of the COcoa Supplement Multivitamins Outcomes Study (COSMOS). After two years, multivitamin use was linked to slower biological aging across five different DNA-based measurements, with the effect amounting to roughly four fewer months of biological aging. That's right: four months. Not four years, not four decades - four months. But hey, every little bit counts when you're racing against your own cellular decay.
Researchers used epigenetic clocks, which estimate biological aging by examining chemical changes in DNA known as DNA methylation, to track aging speed. Participants were randomly assigned to daily cocoa extract and multivitamin, cocoa extract and placebo, placebo and multivitamin, or placebo only. Compared with placebo-only groups, those taking a multivitamin showed slower biological aging across all five clocks, with two clocks strongly associated with mortality risk showing statistically significant slowing. The strongest effects appeared in participants whose biological age was already ahead of their chronological age at the start - basically, the multivitamin helped the most for people who were already aging poorly. "There is a lot of interest today in identifying ways to not just live longer, but to live better," said senior author Howard Sesso, ScD, MPH, associate director of the Division of Preventive Medicine at Mass General Brigham. "It was exciting to see benefits of a multivitamin linked with markers of biological aging."
The COSMOS team plans to continue studying whether this modest slowdown translates into improved cognition, lower cancer risk, or fewer cataracts - conditions previously linked to multivitamin use in other studies. "A lot of people take a multivitamin without necessarily knowing any benefits from taking it, so the more we can learn about its potential health benefits, the better," Sesso added. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and received support from Mars Edge and Pfizer Consumer Healthcare (now Haleon), who donated pills and packaging but had no role in study design or analysis. Because nothing says "unbiased science" like free candy-company vitamins.