History
The first use for vitamin E as a therapeutic agent was conducted in 1938 by Widenbauer. Widenbauer used wheat germ oil supplement on 17 premature newborn infants suffering from growth failure. 11 out of the original 17 patients recovered and were able to resume normal growth rates.
In 1945, Drs. Evan V. Shute and Wilfred E. Shute, two brothers of Ontario, Canada, published the first monograph arguing that megadoses of vitamin E can slow down and even reverse the development of atherosclerosis. Peer-reviewed publications soon followed.
The same research team also demonstrated, in 1946, that alpha tocopherol improved impaired capillary permeability and low platelet counts in experimental and clinical thrombocytopenic purpuras.
Later on, in 1948, while conducting experiments on alloxan effects on rats, Gyorge and Rose noted that the rats receiving tocopherol supplements suffered from less hemolysis than those that did not receive tocopherol. In 1949, Gerloczy administered all-rac-α-tocopheryl acetate to prevent and cure edema. Methods of administration used were both oral, that showed positive response, and intramuscular, which did not show a response. This early investigative work on the benefits of vitamin E supplementation was the gateway to curing the vitamin E deficiency caused hemolytic anemia described during the 1960s. Since then, supplementation of infant formulas with vitamin E has eradicated this vitamin’s deficiency as a cause for hemolytic anemia.
Read more about this topic: Vitamin E
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)