LIVESTRONG Blog

Vitamin E and Prostate Cancer

Oct 13, 2011 by Dr. Brandon Hayes-Lattin, MD
4 Comments

There has been a lot in the news this week about prostate cancer screening and prevention. This new information is important to understand as prostate cancer affects one in six men in the US. Dr. Brandon Hayes-Lattin, LIVESTRONG‘s Senior Medical Advisor, addressed the newest prostate cancer screening recommendations earlier this week and in today’s blog he discusses the newest study about Vitamin E and prostate cancer.

The The Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial was an extensive 7 year study of over 35,000 men that shows vitamin E, formally thought to decrease the risk of prostate cancer, does not cut risk but actually may increase your odds of getting the disease. Please watch the video and let us know what questions you have regarding the newest study.

Want to help advance our knowledge of cancer prevention and treatment? Take part in a clinical trial. Visit our website to learn about trials and to see if there are open trials in which you qualify either as a newly diagnosed patient, survivor or just a person interested in helping out in the fight.

Concerned about how to know what studies are “good studies”? Check out this great article by the National Cancer Institute. “Which Study Results Are the Most Helpful in Making Cancer Care Decisions?“.

Kim

was the vitamin E in this study natural or synthetic?
any thoughts on women taking vitamin E?
Pingback: LIVESTRONG Blog » Blog Archive » Vitamin E and Prostate Cancer | The Cancer Site
http://janopus.com Jan Wooten

If the participants in this study were constantly consuming excess vitamin E above the body’s natural requirement (and normally supplied by a balanced diet), but at the same time not consuming sufficient vitamin C (or other redox appropriate antioxidant) to neutralize the vitamin E radicals that are likely to from the excess vitamin E, why shouldn’t some adverse event be expected to occur over the long term?
Brandon Hayes-Lattin

Thanks for your comments. Designing a large study like this always requires making some upfront decisions on exactly what question is to be answered and what intervention is to be tested. For this trial, the details of those decisions were published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute back in 2004. Here is that link:

http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/2/94.full

LIVESTRONG.

Vitamin E and Prostate Cancer

Oct 13, 2011 by Dr. Brandon Hayes-Lattin, MD4 Comments

Tweet

Oct 13, 2011 by Dr. Brandon Hayes-Lattin, MD
4 Comments