Heart Disease Health Center

B Vitamins Don't Help in Heart Disease

What About Healthy People?

The results "were not particularly surprising," Andrew Shao, PhD, vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, tells WebMD.

Noting that several other trials in recent years have reached the same conclusions, Shao says "it appears to be consistent that [for] subjects who have underlying cardiovascular disease and [are] on multiple medications ... adding B vitamins on top of a whole host of other medications doesn't appear to provide any further benefit."

But Shao says similar trials haven't been done in healthy people to see if B vitamins help prevent heart disease from happening in the first place. Such trials aren't likely to happen, says Shao, because they would need to last decades and include hundreds of thousands of people. "Unfortunately, they're logistically impossible and cost-prohibitive."

Shao points to observational studies that show that people with higher homocysteine levels "are at much higher risk for cardiovascular disease." He acknowledges that observational trials don't prove cause and effect -- that is, they don't show whether homocysteine causes heart disease or rides along with heart disease without instigating it.

"That's an inherent limitation" of observational studies, says Shao, adding that the Norwegian study is limited because "it applies only to a very narrow section of the population. It doesn't answer the question that we're all interested in," which is what is the effect of B vitamin supplements in healthy people.