Vitamin E doesn't aid older women's mental ability

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Long-term use of vitamin E supplements does not provide cognitive benefits for older women, the results of a clinical trial indicate.

Researchers have speculated that treatment with a powerful antioxidant such as vitamin E might help delay or slow cognitive decline in older folk. To investigate, Dr. Jae Hee Kang, from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues analyzed data from the Women's Health Study.

The study was a clinical trial initiated in the 1990s to examine the effects of vitamin E supplementation. The women were at least 60 years of age at the beginning, and they were randomly assigned to take vitamin E or a placebo capsule every other day.

The present analysis focuses on 6377 women who were followed starting in 1998 for changes in cognitive function. Cognition was assessed via telephone using standard measures, and then again 2 and 4 years later. By the time of the final assessment, the women in the active treatment group had been using vitamin E for an average of almost 10 years.

There was no evidence at any of the follow-up points that vitamin E supplementation significantly affected cognitive function, the researchers report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Vitamin E users were 8 percent less likely to experience a substantial decline in global cognitive function compared with controls, but this difference was not significant from a statistical standpoint.

"The findings of this trial, combined with results of other studies, indicate that vitamin E supplementation of 10 years or less does not provide neuroprotection," Kang's team concludes.

In a related editorial, Dr. Mark A. Espeland and Dr. Victor W. Henderson, from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, comment that "there remains a great and increasing need to identify effective interventions for the prevention and management of cognitive decline."

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, December 11/25, 2006.