TAKING a daily multivitamin-mineral supplement may help slow biological ageing, according to research published in Nature Medicine today.
The team from Brigham and Women's Hospital conducted a trial on nearly 1,000 people with an average age of 70 over two years.
Participants were assigned to take a combination of daily multivitamin-multimineral tablet, cocoa extract or a placebo, and five blood-based DNAbased ageing markers were measured.
The authors found that those taking the multivitamin showed a reduction in the yearly rate of increase for two of the 'epigenetic clocks' that are intended to estimate mortality risk - PCPhenoAge and PCGrimAge - by about 2.6 months and 1.4 months, respectively.
Among those who showed fasterthanaverage biological ageing before the trial began, the slowing effect on PCGrimAge was greater, at about 2.8 months.
Professor Luigi Fontana from University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre urged caution in interpreting the results, pointing out the magnitude of the effect was extremely small, and that epigenetic clocks are still research tools, rather than validated clinical endpoints.
Read the paper HERE.
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