[jonex]

They didn't specify what they qualified as a multivitamin, my guess is that the definition is rather loose due to the scale of the study. There's a lot of different mixes of multivitamins in the store. You would buy the one that fit's the efficiency pattern you want to prevent. If your goal is to specifically reduce mortality rather than prevent short term fatigue, you would need to pick the right one.

From what I can tell, they haven't ensure that the long term consumption pattern was consistent either, so they may be mixing people who took multivitamins for a year around the initial study with those who took it every day for their whole life. That would reduce the effect size significantly.

The general advice on vitamin supplements is usually to take the ones you have explicit reasons for taking and to focus more on food in general. This study, while possible useful as a way to debunk highly unrealistic claims of multivitamin effectiveness, doesn't really change the picture here.