Variation in human blood high-density lipoprotein response to oral vitamin E megadosage

In a preliminary attempt to distinguish random intrinsic and methodologic variations of blood lipid levels from any that have possibly been induced by ingestion of vitamin E, blood samples were analyzed in duplicate for lipids several times before and during oral vitamin E administration. Three of eight subjects showed temporally closely coordinated and maintained increases of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and apolipoprotein-A, total apolipoprotein-A, and the ratio of high-density to low-density cholesterols. Changes of other lipids in these three subjects, and lipid changes in the other subjects, were much less dramatic, fell within the range of intrinsic random variation or statistical uncertainty, and showed no significant trends. The results suggest that elevation of high-density lipoproteins in response to ingestion of megadoses of vitamin E is very much an individual characteristic and not uniformly typical of the population at large. The findings complement published examples of individual variation of response to vitamin E as an explanation of disagreements between other reports.