In the Health Professionals Followup Study, men who had higher dietary vitamin E intake or who used vitamin E supplements had a lower risk of bladder cancer over a 12-year period, and "taking vitamin E supplements for 10 or more years decreased risk by more than 30 percent." Read abstract in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

"Prostate cancer is a major public health problem in the developed world. It is the most common human cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths among North American men." In 1999, it was estimated that about 180,000 new cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed and that almost 40,000 men died from it, in North America alone. There is evidence that oxidative damage may play a role in prostate cancer. In a Finnish study of vitamin E and beta-carotene, "there was a 32% reduction in prostate cancer incidence and a 41% reduction in prostate cancer mortality among the men who received supplementary vitamin E." In the Health Professionals Followup Study, men with high selenium levels had only 35 percent as great a risk of prostate cancer as men with low selenium levels. And in a multiyear study of selenium and skin cancer, men who received a supplement of 200 mcg of selenium showed "a 3- to 4-fold reduction in prostate cancer incidence." Other studies suggest that men who eat a lot of tomatoes (rich in lycopene) may also have a lower risk of prostate cancer. The National Institutes of Health are currently funding a study on selenium, vitamin E and prostate cancer, called the SELECT study (Selenium Vitamin E Chemoprevention Trial), which will involve more than 30,000 men. Read the abstract on the NIH PubMed website.

In a retrospective case-control study in Washington state involving almost 450 colon cancer patients and a similar number of controls, the use of multivitamins and vitamin E supplements was associated with a reduced risk of colon cancer. "Men and women who used multivitamin supplements daily for the entire 10-year reference period had one-half the risk of colon cancer compared with those who never used multivitamins during this time period . . . . Those who averaged 200 IU or more of vitamin E per day over the 10 years had a 57% reduction in risk compared with non-users of vitamin E." Read abstract in Cancer Epidemiology: Biomarkers & Prevention online.