A study that was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that vitamin B supplements did not protect people taking them from developing cancer, although past research has suggested it did have the aforementioned effect.

Lead author of the study Dr. Shumin Zhang of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, along with his team, looked at 5,442 female health-care professionals throughout the United States, all of whom had been taking a supplement including vitamins B6, B12 and B9 (also known as folic acid) daily over a period of about seven and a half years.

Research concluded that the group of women who had been given vitamin B presented neither lower nor higher risk of developing cancer than those who had taken a placebo instead. In the former group, scientists reported 187 cancer cases, while in the latter, a number of 192 women developed the condition.

All the persons involved in the study suffered from cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels, which rendered them more prone to being affected by cancer, while their average age was 63.

Nevertheless, the team of researchers informed that where women aged 65 or older from the vitamin supplement group were concerned, the risk of developing breast cancer had been registered to have decreased by 38 percent. Moreover, the chances of them developing any type of cancer were 25 percent lower. Still, the study read that there was no cogent proof that these results had not been a mere non-related to the supplement coincidence.