Multivitamins Slow Cognitive Aging in Older Adults

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hello. This is Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. I'd like to talk with you about some preliminary but exciting findings that multivitamins may improve cognitive function.

Presented at a Clinical Trials on Alzheimer's Disease (C-TAD) meeting in November, these results are from an ancillary study, COSMOS-Mind, funded by the National Institute on Aging and led by colleagues at Wake Forest School of Medicine. The study was a large-scale randomized trial, COcoa Supplement Multivitamins Outcome Study (COSMOS), with more than 21,000 participants nationwide, testing cocoa extract and multivitamins in the prevention of cardiovascular disease and cancer. The results from the main trial are expected to be published in early 2022.

The parent trial is funded by a public-private partnership. The primary funding came from Mars Edge. The study pills were donated by Mars, and the Centrum Silver Multivitamins were donated by Pfizer and GSK Consumer Healthcare. I'd like to acknowledge that I'm a principal investigator of the main COSMOS trial and a co-investigator of COSMOS-Mind.

I'm going to focus on the multivitamins and cognitive function findings from COSMOS-Mind. The cocoa extract and cognition findings are still in progress, including detailed analyses of the potential modifying effect of baseline diet, and those results are expected to be published in early 2022.