A new study suggests that taking a daily multivitamin might actually increase a person's risk of breast cancer.
Research performed by the National Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, found that women who reported taking multivitamins were 19 percent more likely to develop breast cancer.
More than 35,000 Swedish women ages 49 to 83 were studied and about 25 percent of them took multivitamins. None of the women had cancer when the study began, but within 10 years, 293 of the 9,017 women who reported using multivitamins were diagnosed with breast cancer.
"The potential health benefits or adverse effects associated with multivitamin use are of great public health importance [and] the observed association is of concern and merits further investigation," the researchers wrote.
The results of the study were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
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