Vitamin E Lowers Liver Cancer Risk —Study

A new health study has revealed that high intake of vitamin E either from diet or vitamin supplements reduces the risk of liver cancer, which has become the third most common cause of cancer death and the fifth most common cancer found in men.

The study report was published in a recent edition of Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Vitamin E is a vital source of good skin and can be found in foods like green leafy vegetables, nuts, various vegetable oils, wheat germ and wheat germ oil, almonds and almond butter, peanuts and peanut butter, spinach, avocados, mango, tomato, whole grains, total cereal, and corn.

It is believed that approximately 85 per cent of liver cancers occur in developing nations, with 54 per cent in China alone.The study was carried out by Wei Zhang of the Shanghai Cancer Institute, Renji Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine and colleagues, who analyzed data from a total of 132,837 individuals in China enrolled in the Shanghai Women’s Health Study (SWHS) from 1997 to 2000 and the Shanghai Men’s Health Study (SMHS) from 2002 to 2006.

In the study, they compared cancer risk among participants who had high intake of vitamin E with those with low intake.

The analysis included 267 liver cancer patients (118 women and 149 men) who were diagnosed between two years after study enrolment and an average of 10.9 (SWHS) or 5.5 (SMHS) years of follow-up. Vitamin E intake from diet and vitamin E supplement use were both associated with a lower risk of liver cancer, the medical scientists discovered.

This association was consistent among participants with and without self-reported liver disease or a family history of liver cancer. According to the authors, “we found a clear, inverse dose-response relation between vitamin E intake and liver cancer risk.”

They  also noted a small difference between men and women in the risk estimate, which they say is likely attributable to fewer liver cancer cases having occurred among SMHS participants due to the shorter follow-up period.

Their conclusion was that a “high intake of vitamin E either from diet or supplements was related to lower risk of liver cancer in middle-aged or older people.”