In the past five years, a surprising and intense resurgence in interest
in vitamins and other micronutrients and their role in health and dis-
ease has occurred. The recognition has emerged that vitamins not only
are essential for life -in that severe nutritional deficiencies occur in
their absence, but that these compounds may also serve as natural
inhibitors of cancer. Synthetic alterations of the basic vitamin A mole-
cule have also resulted in the production of compounds that are more
potent as anticancer agents than the natural substance and may have
substantial therapeutic activity as well. Whether other vita- mins can
be changed or altered to produce a better anticancer effect than the
native compound has been little explored to date, but should be a
fruitful pursuit for future study. In our concluding remarks to the
First International Conference in 1982, we speculated that rapid
advances in our understanding of vi- tamins would occur in the next few
years and that large-scale inter- vention trials of vitamins as
preventive agents in defined human pop- ulations would be started. This
anticipated generation of data on vitamins and their interactions has
proceeded rapidly and the impor- tance of interactions between vitamins
and other micronutrients in the prevention setting has become better
appreciated. Currently, more than 25 intervention trials with a variety
of target populations using vitamins and other micronutrients have been
started, but it re- mains too early for meaningful analysis of the
results to date.
