Antioxidants keep arteries clean - Heart Transplants - medical research - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Oct, 2002

A clinical study by scientists in the Linus Pauling Institute, Oregon State University, Corvallis, and the Cardiovascular Division of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass., suggests that people who receive heart transplants, and possibly some other types of transplants or medical procedures, may get important health benefits by taking supplements of vitamins C and E. Patients who received supplements of these two antioxidant vitamins had very little coronary arteriosclerosis associated with their transplants. Ordinarily, this is one of the most-important limitations to the long-term survival of cardiac transplant patients, whose arteries tend to thicken and clog unusually fast after a transplant, and this disease is present in more than 70% of recipients within three years.

Oxidant stress tends to contribute to accelerated coronary arteriosclerosis following a transplant, and the body's natural antioxidant defenses are often reduced. Treatment with antioxidant vitamins appears to have a significant effect in addressing this problem, the study found. "Arteriosclerosis is a health condition that's a problem for many people, but it is much more acute and occurs more rapidly in people who have had heart transplants," points out Balz Frei, director of the Linus Pauling Institute.

The double-blind study was done with 40 heart transplant patients. Half of them received 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 800 international units of vitamin E each day. The others received a placebo. After one year, the study showed that coronary arteries had significantly thickened and narrowed within the group that received a placebo, but were largely unchanged in those who received the antioxidants. The use of antioxidants did not appear to interfere with the immunosuppressive drugs the patients needed to take or cause any increase in transplant rejection. Some past studies looking at this and other issues had used vitamin E, by itself, as a supplement, and failed to improve patients' outcomes. The use of both C and E in combination appears to work much better, as there may be complementary interactions between the two vitamins which give results different than either one of them would if used separately.

This type of antioxidant therapy may also have value in other types of organ transplants, such as kidney, lung, and liver, Frei indicates, or angioplasty, a common medical procedure for patients with coronary artery disease, but one that often has to be repeated within a few months when arteries once again become narrowed.