MedWire News: Study results suggest that vitamin E and/or selenium dietary supplementation is not associated with reduced risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in men.

Speaking at the American Thoracic Society International Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana lead researcher P Cassano (Cornell University, New York, USA) explained: “Vitamin E and selenium play a role in antioxidant defenses and may decrease oxidant damage to tissues and thereby reduce the risk of COPD.”

To investigate further, Cassano and team studied data from the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) on 35,533 men, aged an average of 62.4 years at enrolment, from 427 sites in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

The men were randomly assigned to take vitamin E (400 IU/day) and/or selenium (200 µg/day) or placebo and were followed-up for a mean of 5.46 years. None of the men had lung disease at baseline.

Over the study period, 3.27% of the participants were diagnosed with COPD.

Analysis revealed that, overall, men taking vitamin E, selenium, or both supplements did not have a significantly reduced risk for COPD, at hazard ratios (HRs) of 1.08, 1.01, 0.94, compared with those taking placebo.

As expected, smokers had a greater risk for COPD than non-smokers, at an HR of 7.22.

Cassano concluded: “Selenium or vitamin E, alone or in combination, did not prevent COPD in a population of relatively healthy men.”

She said that the data lacked sufficient statistical power to analyze the effect of vitamin E and/or selenium supplementation on COPD risk in smokers, but added: “A spirometry endpoint, currently being evaluated, may give further insight into these questions in a subgroup enriched with smokers.”

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