Skip to contents
In This Issue:
An international collaboration that includes researchers from BWH has discovered an association between the use of vitamin E supplements and increased risk for hemorrhagic stroke. The findings, which are the result of a meta-analysis of nine different studies investigating the effect of vitamin E on stroke, appear online in the Nov. 5 edition of the British Medical Journal.
Researchers found that the participants who took vitamin E were 22 percent more likely to experience hemorrhagic stroke, or bleeding within the brain or between the inner and outer layers of tissue covering the brain.
“These findings suggest that the use of vitamin E may not be as safe as we have believed, and actually seems to be associated with some harm in the form of increased risk for hemorrhagic stroke,” said Markus Schürks, MD, MSc, a researcher in BWH’s Division of Preventive Medicine and the lead author of the paper. “While the risk is small and translates into one additional hemorrhagic stroke for every 1,250 individuals taking vitamin E, we caution against widespread uncontrolled use of vitamin E.”
The research also showed that vitamin E supplementation is associated with a decrease in risk for ischemic stroke, a type of stroke caused by an inadequate supply of blood and oxygen to the brain, resulting in the death of an area of brain tissue. Individuals assigned to receive vitamin E were 10 percent less likely to experience this type of stroke.
In the nine controlled, randomized clinical trials that were included in this analysis, there were a total of 118,765 participants, with approximately half receiving vitamin E and the remainder receiving placebo. Although none of the results of the individual trials indicated any change in the risk for overall stroke, researchers identified marked differences in risk when evaluating the effect of vitamin E on the two different stroke types.
“The associations we see in our study are somewhat similar to aspirin, which can lead to a reduction of ischemic stroke but also increased risk of bleeding,” said Tobias Kurth, MD, ScD, of the Division of Preventive Medicine and senior author of the study. “Although the effects of vitamin E that are shown in this meta-analysis are both relatively small, hemorrhagic strokes generally have more severe outcomes. Based on these findings, we suggest considering other preventive strategies to reduce the risk of stroke such as a well-balanced diet, not smoking, being physically active and maintaining a normal weight.”