Taking vitamin E or selenium supplements is thought to be associated with a greater risk of prostate cancer. The authors of the study call for this supplementation to be stopped.
Contrary to a widely held belief, food supplements rich in vitamins or trace elements could be very bad for your health. A new study has just shown that taking a vitamin E or selenium supplement dramatically increases the risk of developing prostate cancer. These results vary depending on the amount of selenium present in the body of men naturally.
To achieve these results, researchers at SWOG (a cooperative cancer research group) took advantage of a “fortuitous coincidence”: when the SELECT study was set up in 2001, the stated objective was to succeed. whether supplementation with vitamin E or selenium could protect against prostate cancer. Scheduled to last 12 years, the experiment set up on 35,000 men was stopped in 2008, when the first signs of a negative incidence of vitamin E began to appear. Thus in 2010, 2 years after the end of the study, the figures showed that men who had followed the diet rich in vitamin E had 17% more risk of developing prostate cancer.
91% increased risk of cancer
The researchers actually realized that the incidence of vitamin E or selenium supplements was not the same depending on the amount of selenium present in the body of the participants at baseline. For example, scientists found that taking selenium supplementation increased the risk of getting high-grade cancer (the fastest growing cancer) by 91% in men with high baseline selenium. Conversely, among men with a low level of selenium in the body at the base, it is vitamin E which increases their risk of having prostate cancer by 63%, and of having cancer of the prostate. high-grade of 111%.
For Dr. Alan Kristal of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle: “Men who use these kinds of supplements should stop. At once. Neither selenium nor vitamin E has any known benefits – only risks. Therefore, while it appears safe to take standard multivitamins, the effects of single supplementation (eg only vitamin E) at high doses are unpredictable, complex and often dangerous ”.
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