- A large clinical trial found that older adults taking a daily multivitamin showed slightly slower ageing on DNA-based markers over two years.
- The effect was small, roughly equivalent to about four months less biological ageing, and was strongest in people who appeared biologically older at the start.
- It is an interesting result, but not a reason to oversell multivitamins as an anti-ageing fix.
A large study has found that taking a daily multivitamin may modestly slow biological ageing in older adults.
Researchers analysed data from the COSMOS trial, which included 958 healthy participants with an average age of 70.
They used five DNA-based epigenetic clocks to estimate biological ageing over time.
Compared with people taking placebo, those taking a multivitamin showed slower ageing across all five measures.
Two of the clocks showed statistically significant changes.
Overall, the researchers estimated the effect was roughly equal to four fewer months of biological ageing over two years.
That is not nothing, but nor is it dramatic.
The study also found that the people who seemed to benefit most were those whose biological age already looked older than their chronological age at the start.
That may matter if future work confirms it.
The more important point, though, is one of scale.
This is not evidence that multivitamins make people meaningfully younger in any obvious real-world sense.
The effect was modest, and it was based on biomarker clocks rather than visible health outcomes.
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Researchers now want to see whether these changes help explain previous findings around cognition, cancer or cataract risk.
That is a fair next step.
For now, the result is best seen as a small but potentially useful signal.
Multivitamins may have some value in certain older adults, especially where diet quality is not ideal.
But no one should mistake this for a shortcut around the basics of ageing well.
Diet, activity, sleep and not smoking still matter far more.
