Every time I write or broadcast something that doesn't completely laud the use of vitamins in preventing heart disease or cancer or even premature baldness, I get a bunch of nasty letters and e-mails and phone calls that vigorously protest that I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. And you know what really hurts the most? Many of those are from my family, so you can just imagine the tone of some of the other communications about vitamins I get from non-family members.
But you know, I'm just a guy who loves living on the wild side, so I'm going to risk getting some more "contrary" missives deriding me for being a typical doctor who hates vitamins and "natural" remedies, and I'm going to tell you of a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found that vitamins E and C, which are the most commonly-proffered antioxidant miracle vitamins to reduce the risks of getting a heart attack, simply didn't reduce that risk at all. In fact, they had quite the opposite effect.
In this study, which was called the Women's Angiographic Vitamin and Estrogen (WAVE) Trial, researchers put 423 postmenopausal women with established heart disease on either hormone replacement therapy (HRT), or a vitamin regime (vitamin C in a dose of 1000 mg per day, which is a whole lot more than most people generally take in, and vitamin E in a dose of 800 mg per day, a commonly recommended dose to fight heart disease), or some combination of the HRT and vitamins, or a placebo.
So what did they come up with? Well, given all the news that HRT doesn't prevent heart disease, you won't be surprised to learn, I'm sure, that this study confirmed that observation. Postmenopausal women with established heart disease did not get any heart benefits from using HRT, either as a combination of estrogen and progesterone or as estrogen alone.
So here is the surprise: women who took antioxidant vitamins in this study actually had a raised risk of suffering some sort of cardiac event (that's a medical euphemism for a heart attack or sudden death due to a cardiac rhythm disturbance) compared to women who simply took placebos.
That's right: women who took either vitamin C or vitamin E in a bid to reduce their risk of suffering a heart attack actually had a higher risk of suffering such an event.
Now, to be fair, there are several caveats to apply to this study: first, most of us are not, of course, postmenopausal women with heart disease, and this study's results may simply apply to those women and not to the rest of us (although I must add that if there is one group that should be most amenable to this therapy if it really works, I would think it would be precisely the group that was studied).
More important, though, I think, is this: the numbers in this study are so low that they could simply be due to chance, so I am not going to suggest that people who take vitamin E and vitamin C are soon going to keel over as a result of taking those supplements. Moreover, I'm going to be a real liberal and add this bit: hey, folks, if you think those vitamins are helping you, I'm also not about to persuade you to stop taking them. After all, I just report the news, you do what you like with it.
I will say this, however: this is not the first well-designed study to have found no benefit from the use of these vitamins in preventing heart attacks, so it's time perhaps to admit that maybe, just maybe, these particular antioxidant vitamins are not nearly as useful in warding off heart disease as their proponents would like to believe, although there may be other benefits from taking them. (Despite all evidence to the contrary, for example, I still load up on vitamin C when I'm coming down with a cold or flu, and I honestly believe it helps me).