Safety of Vitamins C & E Reaffirmed

Lu Wang, from Harvard Medical School (Massachusetts, USA), and colleagues analyzed data collected in the Physicians’ Health Study II, involving 14,641 US male physicians ages 50 years and older.  Beginning in 1997, subjects were randomly assigned to receive either 400 IU of vitamin E every other day, 500 mg of vitamin C daily, or their respective placebos. The vitamin E and vitamin C treatment ended in 2007, and observational follow-up continued through June 2011.  During an overall mean of 10.3 years, there were a total of 1373 incident prostate cancers and 2669 total cancers documented. Data analysis revealed that vitamin E supplementation, as compared to placebo, “had no effect on the incidence of prostate cancer.” As well, the team observed “no effect of vitamin C supplementation on total cancers … or incident prostate cancer.”  Writing that: “Neither vitamin E nor vitamin C supplementation had effects on other site-specific cancers overall,” the study authors report that: “In this large-scale randomized trial in men, vitamin E and C supplementation had no immediate or long-term effects on the risk of total cancers, prostate cancer, or other site-specific cancers.”