Free Republic

People who take high doses of vitamin E to improve their health may not be getting any benefits and may, in fact, be slightly increasing their risks of dying earlier, researchers reported yesterday. The adverse effect was tiny, however, and some experts with no connections to the vitamin industry say they are not convinced it was demonstrated. It emerged only when the researchers pooled the results from 19 clinical trials involving 135,967 participants. That led them to conclude that there were 39 additional deaths per 10,000 people who were taking vitamin E doses exceeding 400 international units a day. The...

Researchers at Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology have discovered that Vitamin E can help restore hearing for people who suffer from sudden, unexplained deafness. "Sudden Hearing Loss (SHL) occurs quite frequently. It happens suddenly, you can wake up in the morning and feel a loss of hearing in one or both ears. Because of that suddenness, it's a very dramatic and stressful disease," Dr. Henry Z. Yoachims told Israel21c. Yoachims works in the Department of Otolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery at Rambam Medical Center and is a member of the Faculty of Medicine at the Technion. "In about two...

A new and emerging understanding of how heart attacks occur indicates that increasingly popular aggressive treatments may be doing little or nothing to prevent them. The artery-opening methods, like bypass surgery and stents, the widely used wire cages that hold plaque against an artery wall, can alleviate crushing chest pain. Stents can also rescue someone in the midst of a heart attack by destroying an obstruction and holding the closed artery open. But the new model of heart disease shows that the vast majority of heart attacks do not originate with obstructions that narrow arteries. Instead, recent and continuing studies...