UPDATE - Issue 36 - Spring 2009
Disappointing trial results
SELECT (the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial) is the largest-ever prostate cancer prevention trial, with 35,534 participants. Small studies in the 1990s suggested that selenium and vitamin E (alone or in combination) might reduce the risk of developing prostate cancer by 60 percent and 30 percent, respectively, but only a large clinical trial such as SELECT, which began in 2001, could confirm those initial findings.
It is a huge disappointment that independent review of data from SELECT, carried out last autumn, shows that selenium and vitamin E supplements, taken either alone or together for an average of five years, did not prevent prostate cancer. The trial was to have continued until 2013 but now participants have been told to stop taking their study supplements.
Prostate UK has in the past encouraged Update readers to take both Vitamin E and Selenium. We felt that the evidence supporting the initiation of SELECT was sufficiently strong to warrant taking the supplements. It seems we were wrong. Our apologies.
See the online Journal of the American Medical Association 9 December 2008