Get Granddad to take his vitamin E.

While it's not a fountain of youth, it sometimes resembles a spring of middle age. In a variety of studies, the antioxidant tocopherol-better known as vitamin E-has exhibited an impressive ability to retard not only some features of atherosclerosis and cancer, but also the development of cataracts and other degenerative conditions that accompany aging.

Now comes a study in the elderly that addresses the overriding question:

Does the supplement lengthen life?

Katalin G. Losonczy and her colleagues at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md., analyzed consumption of the antioxidant vitamins C and E among 11,178 people age 67 to 105. In the 6 years during which their health was followed, 3,490 of these men and women died. After adjusting for age and sex, the NIA researchers found that individuals who were taking vitamin E capsules at the time of the initial questionnaire were only two-thirds as likely to have died during the course of the study as those who hadn't taken the vitamins.

Indeed, vitamin E users were only half as likely to die of heart disease as those taking no supplements and just 77 percent as likely to die of cancer, Losonczy's team reports in the August American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Tocopherol's benefits were even more pronounced in people who had taken the vitamin for a long time-through at least two questionnaires, administered 3 years apart. Compared to those eschewing supplements, they were less than 40 percent as likely to have died of heart disease and 41 percent as likely to have succumbed to cancer.

Vitamin C supplements alone had no apparent effect on death rates from any cause, nor did consumption of multiple-vitamin and mineral supplements, though the latter probably contained small amounts of extra E. The reason may trace to dose. Although Losonczy and her coworkers had no data on the amount of vitamin E in the supplements that had been consumed, they note that most vitamin E capsules contain at least 100 international units-more than three times the amount typically found in multivitamin supplements.