Thread: Vitamin E loses luster

May be bad for heart

BY PAUL H.B. SHIN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Vitamin E got another damning F grade yesterday from researchers who found that popping high doses doesn't help protect against heart disease or cancer - and could even be bad for your heart.
"The coffin is pretty well nailed shut on Vitamin E," said Dr. Greg Brown, a cardiologist at the University of Washington, who wrote an editorial accompanying the findings in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

"Vitamin E doesn't help and, I think, there's sufficient evidence to say that Vitamin E in higher doses may indeed be detrimental," Brown told the Daily News, although he added that it may still prove useful for some ailments, such as kidney disease or severe eye problems.

But the results add to mounting evidence that antioxidant vitamins - E, C and beta carotene - are useless against cancer or heart disease. "We were surprised there was no benefit," said lead researcher Dr. Eva Lonn, a cardiologist at McMaster University near Toronto.

She noted that the conclusion of a greater risk of heart failure among people older than 55 with high blood pressure needs to be confirmed by further study.

The results of the trial, which tracked more than 9,000 people for seven years, follows research released last week on nearly 40,000 healthy women showing no heart benefits from Vitamin E.

And Johns Hopkins University scientists found in November that that seniors taking 400 international units, or IUs, of Vitamin E were slightly more likely todie of any cause than those on smaller doses. Vitamin E pills commonly found in pharmacies and health food stores contain 400 IUs - about 20 times thegovernment-recommended amount.

About one in eight American adults takes 400 IUs of Vitamin E every day, according to reports by the nutritional supplement industry, which sold more than $710 million of Vitamin E pills in 2003.

Vitamin E was hailed as an elixir of youth after two large studies in the early 1990s showed regular users had less heart trouble. But those studies - unlike more regimented clinical trials - could not rule out the possibility that people taking dietary supplements might be healthier to begin with.

Annette Dickinson, president of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a Washington trade group for vitamin makers, said the study is "not the final word on Vitamin E," and said researchers are now studying whether it protects against prostate cancer.

Originally Posted by min0 lee

May be bad for heart

BY PAUL H.B. SHIN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

.....
And Johns Hopkins University scientists found in November that that seniors taking 400 international units, or IUs, of Vitamin E were slightly more likely todie of any cause than those on smaller doses. Vitamin E pills commonly found in pharmacies and health food stores contain 400 IUs - about 20 times thegovernment-recommended amount.

Yes, the heart data is pretty much acceppted among physicians, but there is still promising data in terms of benenfits against alzheimers. http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclabi...ol4/iss2/art1/
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/467285?src=search

As for the John Hopkins study........ This story is a classic overreaction to scientific data. While I am not a fan of additional vitamins, I am unwilling to extrapolate from this study to insisting that patients not take Vitamin E supplements. It goes to show how the vitamin industy is finally being subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny the medical professionals have demanded of prescription drugs, so that is quite refreshing.

To get back, the adverse effect was tiny, however, and some experts with no connections to the vitamin industry say they are not convinced it was demonstrated. It emerged only when the researchers pooled the results from 19 clinical trials involving 135,967 participants. That led them to conclude that there were 39 additional deaths per 10,000 people who were taking vitamin E doses exceeding 400 international units a day.

In other words, the evidence of harm was so weak, this guy and his colleagues decided to pool data from 19 studies to get more definitive answers. Their paper, however, would fail to convince some statisticians who would argue that it is notoriously difficult to pool data from disparate studies with different populations and weak results.

“They may well be right, but as a statistician I find this paper unpersuasive,” said Dr. David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California at Berkeley. But since there also is no evidence that the vitamin can help, he added, “I personally wouldn’t recommend that you take large doses.”

Dr. James Robins, a Harvard statistician, had a similar reaction.

“They may be right but they somewhat oversold it statistically,” Dr. Robins said. “It is definitely true that there is no evidence that the low dose does anything for you, and a high dose may be bad. I wouldn’t tell anyone to take this stuff, but this is hardly definitive evidence.”

And here is a article talking about vit e and alzheimer's but also how another large study showed no diffference in death rates in those who took vit e vs those who did not. http://www.uky.edu/PR/News/041215_vitamin_e.htm