A team of scientists has figured it out how vitamin E keeps muscles healthy.
Vitamin E has long known as a powerful antioxidant and now scientists have shown that without it, the plasma membrane, which essentially keeps a cell from spilling its contents and controls what moves in and out, cannot properly heal.
Georgia Regents University's Paul L. McNeil said that every cell in human body has a plasma membrane and every membrane can be torn," said Dr., cell biologist at the Medical College of Georgia at and corresponding author of the study
Part of how people build muscle is a more natural tearing and repair process, that is the no pain, no gain portion, but if that repair doesn't occur, there is muscle cell death. If that occurs over a long period of time, there is muscle-wasting disease, added McNeil.
For the new study, rats were fed either normal rodent chow, chow where vitamin E had been removed or vitamin E-deficient chow where the vitamin was supplemented.
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They found vitamin E-deficient rats were generally deficient in their running ability compared with controls and made significantly more visits to a grid, despite the fact that they received a mild electric shock when they stood there.
The scientists also administered a dye that could not permeate an intact plasma membrane and found it easily penetrated the muscle cells of vitamin E-deficient rats. McNeil notes that a healthy cell makes a patch within a minute and has completely restored the cell membrane within a few minutes.
McNeil's finding that vitamin E is essential to rapid cell membrane repair, and ultimately cell survival, likely holds up across different cell types because, in culture at least, when the scientists have treated a number of different cells types with vitamin E, they documented similar enhanced cell membrane repair.
The study appears in the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine.
