The Clinical Trial The (first) study comes from the Neuroscience Department of the Regina Elena National Cancer Institute in Rome, Italy. Its aim was to evaluate the nerve-protective effect of antioxidant supplementation with vitamin E in patients who were being treated with cisplatin chemotherapy. Between April 1999 and October 2000, these patients were randomly assigned to receive either cisplatin alone or cisplatin with vitamin E supplementation. Alpha-tocopherol (300 milligrams per day = approximately 300 International Units) was administered orally before cisplatin chemotherapy and then continued for three months after the suspension of the treatment. Twenty-seven patients completed six cycles of cisplatin chemotherapy: 13 in the supplementation group and 14 in the chemotherapy-alone group. The incidence of nerve damage was 85.7 percent with cisplatin alone. But this fell to 30.7 percent when this single antioxidant was added. This was a nearly two-thirds reduction and was, of course, highly significant. The severity of the nerve damage was also significantly lower in patients who were supplemented with vitamin E. Preclinical studies showed that when cisplatin was combined with vitamin E, "no differences were observed in tumor weight inhibition, tumor growth delay, or life span as compared with treatment with cisplatin alone." In other words "supplementation of patients receiving cisplatin chemotherapy with vitamin E decreases the incidence and severity of peripheral neurotoxicity," but does not interfere with the effectiveness of treatment. The finding is particularly significant because cisplatin is an alkylating agent, the kind of chemotherapy whose potency is said by some oncologists to be diminished by concurrent antioxidant use. That is because such agents are thought to work by generating "free radicals" in cancerous cells. Antioxidants theoretically could interfere with that activity. In reality, however, that does not appear to happen. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the "Bible" of the cancer world. Hopefully, it will have an impact on oncologists who have been telling their patients never to take antioxidants during chemotherapy, on the unproven premise that this would undermine the effectiveness of toxic drugs. www.cancerdecisions.com Remember we are NOT Doctors and have NO medical training. This site is like an Encylopedia - there are many pages, many links on many topics. Support our work with any size DONATION - see left side of any page - for how to donate. You can help raise awareness of CAM.