Vitamin E: an overview

Abstract Vitamin E refers to a functional food and dietary nutrient that plays an important role in maintaining human health and nutritional status. Vitamin E is mainly known as an antioxidant, which attacks free radicals and thus protects cells against damage and the human body against aging. Vitamin E components were proposed to prevent some chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases, by acting either as an antioxidant or through other molecular mechanisms. Importantly, vitamin E has been shown to block the pharmacological action of several drugs revealing a risk of treatment failure, which suggests that diet enrichment in vitamin E must be avoided in these cases. We will present a brief history of the discovery of vitamin E, its chemistry, and we will give an overview of its molecular properties with an emphasis on its impairment of the anticancer action of tamoxifen in breast cancers.