Alzheimer’s disease continues to baffle the medical community and it is only now that the progression and the etiology of the disease are being unraveled. Each day a new small but significant discovery is being made which can play a part in the management of the disease.
Vitamin E is seen to help slow the effects of mild to moderate forms of Alzheimer’s disease and it is now being recommended as a possible line of treatment.
Patients who are administered high doses of Vitamin E foe a period of two years slowed the progression of Alzheimer’s disease by almost 6.2 months in comparison with placebo. The study has been recently published by The Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers have suggested that Doctors can use Vitamin E as an option for treating early or moderate afflictions of Alzheimer’s disease.
Vitamin E is a powerful anti-oxidant and is known to preempt the effects of Free Radicals which are known to be initiators of a number of serious ailments like carcinoma, and cardiovascular disease.
Maurice Dysken, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota and the lead author said, that “A delay in six months over two years, that’s very meaningful to some patients and caregivers,”
Dysken, who is also the past director of the Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, cautioned that his study in no way suggests that Vitamin E will prevent Alzheimer’s disease in healthy persons.
The study involved 613 geriatric patients who were administered vitamin E, a combination of vitamin E and Forest Laboratories’ Namenda for moderate to severe Alzheimer’s, Namenda alone or a placebo. The Vitamin E was given in a dosage which was 20 times the dosage normally found in any multivitamin supplement.
The study revealed that vitamin E slowed the deterioration of the disease by 19 percent a year compared with a placebo.
More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease.