One third of Americans mixing supplements with meds: study
One third of Americans mixing supplements with meds: study
By Shereen Jegtvig
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - One in three adults in the U.S.
take both prescription drugs and dietary supplements, creating a
risk for dangerous interactions, according to a new study.
Multivitamins with added ingredients like herbs or fish oil
were the most common form of supplement mixed with medications,
researchers found.
"Multivitamins are commonly assumed to be safe, but our
analysis suggests multivitamins, which may include multivitamin
'plus' combination products, can also contain botanical and
herbal ingredients that have the potential to interact with
prescription medications," Harris Lieberman told Reuters Health
in an email.
Lieberman, the study's senior author, is a researcher with
the Military Nutrition Division of the U.S. Army Research
Institute of Environmental Medicine (USARIEM) in Natick,
Massachusetts.
For their study, Lieberman, along with lead author Emily
Farina and their colleagues, used information taken from the
2005 - 2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
(NHANES).
They focused on 10,480 adults (4,934 women who were not
pregnant and 5,016 men) who answered survey questions about
their dietary supplement and prescription medication use, as
well as whether they had any of the following medical
conditions: asthma, arthritis, congestive heart failure,
coronary heart disease, angina, heart attack, stroke, high blood
pressure, high cholesterol emphysema, chronic bronchitis,
cancer, weak bones or problems with the liver, thyroid or
kidneys.
They found that 47% of participants diagnosed with any of
those medical conditions used both supplements and prescription
medications, compared to about 17% of adults who didn't have
those conditions, but were taking prescription medications for
other reasons, such as birth control pills or antidepressants.
Overall, 34% of the participants - representing some 72
million people in the U.S. - were taking some kind of dietary
supplement along with a prescription medication, they reported
online April 7 in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and
Dietetics.
Cardiovascular medications were most likely to be used along
with dietary supplements, followed by central nervous system
agents, hormones, metabolism-related drugs, psychotherapeutic
agents and antibiotics or antivirals.
Multivitamins containing other ingredients were more common
than standard multivitamins. The ingredients most often added to
the enhanced multivitamins included fish oil, botanicals, herbs,
probiotics, fiber, enzymes, antacids and glucosamine and
chondroitin.
Supplement use was most common among people with
osteoporosis, followed by those with thyroid, cancer, arthritis,
cardiovascular, kidney, diabetes, respiratory and liver
conditions.
The authors call the findings "concerning" because some
herbal supplements are known to alter the way the liver
metabolizes drugs, and can increase or weaken the potency of a
medication.
Annette Dickinson told Reuters Health that the large number
of people who used both supplements and prescription medications
in the study didn't surprise her.
Dickinson is a consultant for the Council for Responsible
Nutrition, a supplement industry trade group, and an adjunct
professor in food science and nutrition at the University of
Minnesota.
She wasn't involved in the new study, but has researched
some of the reasons why consumers take dietary supplements.
"Obviously anybody who is taking prescription medication
should be telling their doctor everything they're taking so that
a judgment can be made whether there is, or might be, an issue,"
she said.
The National Institutes of Health MedlinePlus website (http://1.usa.gov/1hcxeF7)
has information on interactions between drugs, supplements and
herbal ingredients.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1nVYARV
J Acad Nutr Diet 2014.
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