Kathryn Hall, Ph.D., MPH, from the Division of Preventative Medicine at Brigham, was quoted as saying, “Observational studies of people taking vitamin E have reported benefits, and studies in animal models have suggested a protective effect, but when vitamin E supplements were brought into placebo-controlled clinical trials, the results were null. This made it easy to assume that vitamin E just doesn’t work. But what we’ve found is that it may have been protective in some and not in others, and that genetic variation is linked to these outcomes.