Ageing: A daily multivitamin might help slow biological ageing (Nature Medicine)
10 March 2026
A daily multivitamin–multimineral supplement significantly slowed certain markers of biological ageing after 2 years of treatment in a study involving 958 older adults. The results, published in Nature Medicine, indicate that such supplements may help to support healthy biological ageing, although more research is needed to understand their longer-term effects.
Biological ageing refers to changes that occur in the body over time, and it can differ from a person’s chronological age in years. Scientists use ‘epigenetic clocks’, which measure DNA patterns in blood, to estimate this biological ageing process. Many older adults do not get enough essential vitamins and minerals through their diet, such as vitamin B12, and previous clinical trials have found that multivitamin–multimineral supplements may reduce chronic disease. However, their influence on biological ageing is unclear.
Howard Sesso and colleagues measured five blood-based DNA based ageing markers for 958 participants with an average age of about 70 years. In a pre-specified analysis of a randomized clinical trial, participants were assigned to take a combination of daily multivitamin–multimineral tablet, cocoa extract or a placebo, with a follow-up of 2 years. The authors found that participants in the multivitamin–multimineral group 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. For people who showed faster than average biological ageing before the trial began, the slowing effect on PCGrimAge was greater, at about 2.8 months. The multivitamin–multimineral did not significantly affect the other three clocks that were assessed. The cocoa extract was not found to slow biological ageing for any of the five clocks tested.
The findings suggest that daily multivitamin–multimineral supplements may have a modest benefit on biological ageing, particularly for people who are ageing more quickly according to DNA based clocks. The authors note that only mostly non-Hispanic white participants were involved in the research and that further trials with larger and more diverse groups and longer follow-ups are needed.
- Article
- Published: 09 March 2026
Li, S., Hamaya, R., Zhu, H. et al. Effects of daily multivitamin–multimineral and cocoa extract supplementation on epigenetic aging clocks in the COSMOS randomized clinical trial. Nat Med (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-026-04239-3
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