Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Despite no sufficient evidence on benefits and harms of multivitamin use, cancer survivors use multivitamins as a self-care strategy to improve or maintain health. We examined if multivitamin use was associated with mortality in cancer survivors. Types and frequency of multivitamin use at on average 4. Multivitamin use may provide a modest survival benefit to some cancer survivors. Cancer care providers should talk with cancer survivors about potential benefits and harms of multivitamin use.
Cancer survivors are a growing population that is expected to increase to As cancer survivors are often motivated to seek self-care strategies to improve and preserve their health and quality of life, dietary supplement use, especially multivitamins, is prevalent in cancer survivors.
Cancer survivors seek advice on dietary supplement use from oncologists, primary care providers, and other health care providers, but also rely on media sources [ 3 , 5 , 6 ]. Main reasons for using dietary supplements were to improve or maintain overall health, support bone health, or supplement the diet [ 3 ]. Dietary supplement users also tended to believe that supplements were important for preventing cancer recurrence [ 7 ]. However, the perceived benefit of multivitamin use for cancer survivors is not based on sufficient scientific evidence.
A limited number of studies, mostly in breast or colorectal cancer survivors, have examined multivitamin use in relation to cancer prognosis or mortality and found some or no survival benefit or even adverse health effects in some cancer survivors [ 8 โ 16 ]. To provide evidence on the effect of multivitamin use on cancer survival and help cancer survivors and health care providers to make informed decisions on multivitamin use, we investigated if multivitamin use was related to all-cause, cancer, and cardiovascular disease CVD mortality in male and female cancer survivors.
Participants completed a mailed questionnaire about demographics, medical history, health behaviors, diet, and cancer risk factors at baseline in โ and a follow-up questionnaire FUQ asking medical history, health behaviors, and lifestyle in โ Participants have been followed for cancer by linkage to state cancer registries that provided data on cancer diagnosis date, morphology, stage, grade, and a first course of cancer treatment. Completion of the self-administered baseline questionnaire was considered to imply informed consent.
