Researchers have issued a warning about vitamin E after finding it linked to a kind of stroke.
“Indiscriminate widespread” use of vitamin E should be discouraged because of the link to stroke caused by bleeding in the brain, researchers warn today.
Taking the vitamin increased the risk of haemorrhagic stroke, where bleeding occurs in the brain, by 22 per cent, according to a report in the British Medical Journal.
However, the international team of researchers also found that it reduced the risk of ischaemic stroke – caused by clotting in the brain – by ten per cent.
The report stresses that the absolute effects are small – 0.8 more haemorrhagic strokes and 2.1 fewer ischaemic strokes per 1,000 treated persons – which means there is the chance of one additional haemorrhagic stroke for every 1,250 people taking vitamin E. In contrast one ischaemic stroke was prevented for every 476 people taking vitamin E.
Other preventive strategies, such as blood pressure and cholesterol lowering drugs and living a healthy lifestyle, have more effect on reducing stroke than intake of vitamin E, the report says.
Researchers from the US, France and Germany carried out a review of existing studies that had looked at vitamin E and its reported effect on different types of stroke.
They examined nine trials, totalling 118,756 participants, 59,357 of whom took the vitamin and 59,408 who took a placebo.
None of the results from the individual trials suggested that vitamin E significantly altered the risk for total stroke, but there were stark differences when looking at the effect of the vitamin by type of stroke.
A total of 223 haemorrhagic strokes occurred among 50,334 people assigned to take vitamin E and 183 such strokes among the 50,414 people taking placebo. It means the group taking the vitamin were 22 per cent more likely to have this kind of stroke.
For ischaemic stroke, the analysis showed that of the 45,670 people taking vitamin E, 884 had this form of stroke, compared with 983 of the 45,733 people taking placebo, which means that those taking the vitamin were ten per cent less likely to have a stroke.
“Given the relatively small risk reduction of ischaemic stroke and the generally more severe outcome of haemorrhagic stroke, indiscriminate widespread use of vitamin E should be cautioned against,” the researchers led by Markus Schürks, of Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, add.
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