Executive Summary

"Evidence for routine use of multivitamin and mineral supplements to reduce infections in elderly people is weak and conflicting," Alia El-Kadiki, University of Leicester, England, et al., report in the April 16 British Medical Journal. The authors conducted a meta-analysis of eight studies collected from Medline and other databases that evaluated the effect of multivitamins on infections in the elderly. The assessment focused on the mean difference in number of days spent with infection, the odds rate of at least one infection in the study period and the incidence rate ratio for the difference in infection rates. Three of the eight studies showed multivitamin use reduced the mean annual number of days spent with infection by 17.5, the authors note...