The association between B vitamins supplementation and adverse cardiovascular events: a meta-analysis

This study is to explore the association of adverse cardiovascular events with B vitamins supplementation. Rev.Man 5.1 and Stata 11.0 software were applied for the meta-analysis. The number of cardiovascular events was collected and calculated using indicates of odds ratio and 95% confidence intervals in a fixed-effects or a random-effects model when appropriate. The study includes 15 studies which consists of 37,358 study objects (experimental group: 19,601; control group: 17,757). This study showed that the pooled ORs was 1.01 (95% CI = 0.96~1.06, P > 0.05) for objects with Experimental group (B vitamins supplementation) vs. Control group (placebo or regular treatment), which suggests no significant differences were found in the overall effect of the number of cardiovascular events between the two groups. Further stratification of subgroup analysis indicates no significant differences were found between the two groups as well. There were also no publication bias existing by the Egger's linear regression test (P > 0.05). Our result indicates that the number of cardiovascular events in experimental group using B vitamins supplementation during the treatment is equal to placebo or regular treatment group thus further studies is necessary.