Cool. Huge prospective study. They demonstrated that there’s no reduction in (several types of) cancer or heart attack mortality with either vit. E or vit. C supplementation (400 IU of vitamin E every other day and 500 mg of vitamin C daily). It’s strange to me that they don’t look at all-cause mortality.
I think they did look at overall mortality. Quoting from the abstract of the 2008 paper
Neither vitamin E (HR, 1.07 [95% CI, 0.97-1.18]; P = .15) nor vitamin C (HR, 1.07 [95% CI, 0.97-1.18]; P = .16) had a significant effect on total mortality but vitamin E was associated with an increased risk of hemorrhagic stroke (HR, 1.74 [95% CI, 1.04-2.91]; P = .04).)
You’re right. I missed it. I know they say it’s not significant, but in fact the two P=.15 are weakly convincing to me (95% CI of .97-1.18). The old men are dying off 7% more often if they have the (thought to be reasonable at the beginning of the study) dose of vit C or E (compared to placebo). Redo the study and you’ll probably get something like 4-10% instead of 7%. I think this is pretty good evidence for Robin’s claim.
This sort of binary treatment-variable study can always be criticized for overly high doseage, as Phil Goetz pointed out. The 400 IU vit E every 2 days is well under the dose already commonly accepted to cause long-term problems (400 IU daily). The 500mg vit. C daily is well above the highest dietary recommendation of 100mg/day, but it’s well below the amount some people take.
See http://phs.bwh.harvard.edu/
Cool. Huge prospective study. They demonstrated that there’s no reduction in (several types of) cancer or heart attack mortality with either vit. E or vit. C supplementation (400 IU of vitamin E every other day and 500 mg of vitamin C daily). It’s strange to me that they don’t look at all-cause mortality.
I think they did look at overall mortality. Quoting from the abstract of the 2008 paper
You’re right. I missed it. I know they say it’s not significant, but in fact the two P=.15 are weakly convincing to me (95% CI of .97-1.18). The old men are dying off 7% more often if they have the (thought to be reasonable at the beginning of the study) dose of vit C or E (compared to placebo). Redo the study and you’ll probably get something like 4-10% instead of 7%. I think this is pretty good evidence for Robin’s claim.
This sort of binary treatment-variable study can always be criticized for overly high doseage, as Phil Goetz pointed out. The 400 IU vit E every 2 days is well under the dose already commonly accepted to cause long-term problems (400 IU daily). The 500mg vit. C daily is well above the highest dietary recommendation of 100mg/day, but it’s well below the amount some people take.