Vitamin E & Your Heart

According to a new study by Vanderbilt University researchers, higher doses of vitamin E may help protect the heart. These researchers believe that previous studies that failed to show this relationship used too low of a dosage of Vitamin E for their study.*

Vanderbilt’s recent research, published in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, was a two part study. The first study was small, only 8  participants (average age 34) received 3200 IU of vitamin E for 20 weeks. Researchers reported that after 16 weeks the participants had maximum reduction of the oxidative stress. The second study, a double-blind placebo-controlled study, had 35 participants (average age 42) and investigated the effects of different dosages of vitamin E for 16 weeks. They concluded that those participants that took 1600 IU of vitamin E daily lowered their oxidative stress by 35% and dosages of 3200 IU had a 49% reduction.

More studies will be done in the future regarding antioxidants, such as vitamin E, and its potential influences on heart health.

*L.J. Roberts II, J.A. Oates, M.F. Linton, S. Fazio, B.P. Meador, M.D. Gross, Y. Shyr and J.D. Morrow. Free Radical Biology and Medicine (Elsevier). “The relationship between dose of vitamin E and suppression of oxidative stress in humans.” Published on-line ahead of print, 4 July 2007.