Haphazard use of vitamin E may do more harm than good, according to a recent report on vitamin E supplementation and heart disease.
Sizing up data on more than 300,000 study subjects, investigators found that those who didn't take vitamin E supplements had more "quality-adjusted-life years" (QALY), a parameter used in medicine to measure the effect of medical interventions. "To explain the meaning of this parameter," said study co-researcher Dr. Ilya Pinchuk in a press release, "consider a participant who was healthy during the first 10 out of 20 years of the study, but then suffered a stroke and became dependent on others throughout the following 10 years. The QALY during the first 10 years of healthy life is 10, but after the stroke the quality of life is only half of what this person had before. Therefore, the second decade is considered the equivalent of merely 5 years of healthy life and in sum a person's QALY is 15."
The researchers also found that while some individuals may be harmed by vitamin E supplementation, others may benefit from taking vitamin E. The medical community's challenge is to now "establish selection criteria that will predict who is likely to benefit from vitamin E supplementation," the authors note in their report.
