Anti-inflammatory Properties of Alpha- and Gamma-tocopherol

Overview

Journal Mol Aspects Med

Specialties Biochemistry
Molecular Biology

Date 2007 Feb 24

PMID 17316780

Citations 89

Authors

Elke Reiter

Qing Jiang

Stephan Christen

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Natural vitamin E consists of four different tocopherol and four different tocotrienol homologues (alpha,beta, gamma, delta) that all have antioxidant activity. However, recent data indicate that the different vitamin E homologues also have biological activity unrelated to their antioxidant activity. In this review, we discuss the anti-inflammatory properties of the two major forms of vitamin E, alpha-tocopherol (alphaT) and gamma-tocopherol (gammaT), and discuss the potential molecular mechanisms involved in these effects. While both tocopherols exhibit anti-inflammatory activity in vitro and in vivo, supplementation with mixed (gammaT-enriched) tocopherols seems to be more potent than supplementation with alphaT alone. This may explain the mostly negative outcomes of the recent large-scale interventional chronic disease prevention trials with alphaT only and thus warrants further investigation.

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