The Food and Drug Administration has released new educational supports for healthcare providers, consumers and educators about the potential benefits and risks of dietary supplements.
Resources from the Supplement Your Knowledge initiative include a free continuing medical education program for physicians, nurses and other clinicians. The program aims to help these providers explain usage to their patients and to better recognize and report adverse events to the FDA, the agency said in a Thursday announcement.
The program may be accessed on the FDA’s Healthcare Professionals website and includes three videos and companion education materials.
More than half of Americans use dietary supplements such as vitamins, minerals and herbs daily or on occasion, the agency reported. Some supplements may interact with medicines or other supplements, causing a reaction or illness. Patients experiencing these outcomes should immediately stop using the product, the FDA said.
Reports of adverse events associated with dietary supplements can be reported using the FDA’s Safety Reporting Portal.
There is spotty, and sometimes lacking evidence for the usefulness of supplements for targeted health benefits. A 2019 report by the Global Council on Brain Health, a collaborative convened by the AARP, found that dietary supplements have no effect on brain health, cognitive decline, dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. Yet fully 26% of adults age 50 and older report taking one or more supplements such as multivitamins to improve their cognitive functioning, the AARP states.
Another study from the same year found little evidence that supplements or certain diet modifications protect heart health or improve cardiovascular outcomes.
But supplements have also been found to be helpful. A recent investigation funded by the National Institutes of Health supports the use of a supplement formula to halt age-related macular degeneration, an incurable eye disease that can lead to blindness if left untreated.
The Supplement Your Knowledge resources is designed to help clinicians support patients in making informed decisions about the use of supplements, said Douglas Stearn, Deputy Director for Regulatory Affairs in the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
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