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Do Multivitamins Help to Maintain Brain Health and Function?

Do Multivitamins Help to Maintain Brain Health and Function?
Image source: harvard.edu

Lifting weights makes your body stronger, but how do we keep our brains healthy and functioning? Taking daily multivitamins is a key strategy for improving brain function and multivitamins help to maintain brain health. The body can benefit from a variety of vitamins, and vitamins can also help to boost long-term brain health.

What is a multivitamin?

A multivitamin is a supplement that contains vitamins, dietary minerals, and other nutritional components. These medications can be found as tablets, capsules, pastilles, powders, liquids, or injectable formulations. According to their solubility in lipids (vitamins A, D, E, K, and F) or in water (vitamins C, B-complex), vitamins can be categorized. Vitamins, which are present in trace amounts in many foods, are essential for maintaining a healthy metabolism and biochemical systems.

What purposes do multivitamins serve?

The use of multivitamins is used to treat or prevent vitamin deficiencies helped bring on by a poor diet or specific diseases and also multivitamins help to maintain brain health. Folgard, Natalins Rx, Nestabs CBF, and Nestabs FA are some of the various brand names for multivitamins.

It is advised by experts to take your multivitamin in the morning with food and water.

Can daily multivitamins help to maintain brain health and function in older adults?

There are currently few ways and multivitamins help to maintain brain health. For instance, consistent exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, and eating a heart-healthy diet can enhance cardiovascular health and reduce the risk of developing some types of dementia, such as dementia brought on by strokes. Despite claims made in advertisements, no currently available drugs, supplements, or treatments reliably maintain brain health and function over the long term outside of such sensible measures.

Researchers are still looking into the possible benefits of particular foods and multivitamins help to maintain brain health for this reason. More than 2,200 volunteers aged 65 and older participated in a recent study that was recently published in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia. They were randomized to receive cocoa, a multivitamin, or both over the course of three years. Centrum Silver, a multivitamin with 27 vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients in varying concentrations, was selected for this study.

When cognitive tests were analyzed at the conclusion of the study, those taking cocoa showed no improvement. However, individuals who were instructed to take a multivitamin got better results on tests of

  • general brain activity (especially in people with cardiovascular disease)
  • memory
  • executive capability (tasks such as planning ahead or remembering instructions).

In light of these results, the researchers determined that a three-year multivitamin routine could delay the age-related decline in brain function by as much as 60%.

Notably, the majority of study participants (89% of them were white), had an average age of 73 and were largely women (60%).

Do we all need to take multivitamins?

Multivitamins help to maintain brain health but the results of the above study do not support the routine use of multivitamins by individuals of all ages. It's possible that the advantages for older persons observed in this study were brought on by nutrient deficiencies in some of the study participants. Because it wasn't included within the study, we are unsure if this is accurate.

It's also possible that the benefits described here are insignificant, decrease with time, or have no impact on preventing common forms of dementia. It's also difficult to discount a previous, larger, longer-term randomized, placebo-controlled experiment that revealed no change in brain function among male physicians 65 and older who took multivitamins.

But it does show that more research is necessary. We need to know who will most likely benefit from taking a multivitamin, which multivitamins help to maintain brain health, what the ideal dose is, and what components of the multivitamin are most essential. Trials that are bigger, last longer, and involve a wider range of individuals are also necessary. Additionally, there is a distinction to be made between improving cognitive function and avoiding dementia. We still need to find out if taking multivitamins or other dietary supplements may prevent diseases like Alzheimer's.

Final word

There are lots of claims that specific multivitamins help to maintain brain health. However, solid scientific evidence supporting those claims is much less common. This is one reason why the new study is significant: if it holds up, it would suggest that millions of elderly people could improve their quality of life by taking a safe, widely accessible, and affordable vitamin supplement.

Remember that your brain goes through three stages throughout the course of your lifetime: development, maturation, and 65 and older. Giving your brain what it requires for optimum performance at each stage is essential for maintaining brain health throughout time.