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Richard A. Ehrenkranz, MD

Am J Dis Child. 1980;134(12):1157-1166.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In 1922, Evans and Bishop¹ demonstrated the existence of a fat-soluble dietary factor that was required for reproduction in rats. Animals deficient in this factor, which was designated vitamin E,² ovulated and conceived normally, but fetal death and resorption occurred at some time during gestation.³ Evans and his associates⁴ isolated the vitamin from wheat germ oil in 1936 and proposed the name "-tocopherol" from the Greek tokos, a noun meaning childbirth, and phero, a verb meaning to bear. The suffix, -ol, was added to indicate that the substance was an alcohol. Although eight different tocopherols with vitamin E activity have been shown to occur naturally, -tocopherol (Fig 1) is considered to be the most important, since it possesses the greatest biological activity and comprises about 90% of the total tocopherols present in animal tissues.⁵ The standard unit of vitamin E activity is DL--tocopheryl acetate, 1 . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Division of Perinatal Medicine, Departments of Pediatrics and Obstetrics and Gynecology, Yale University School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, Conn.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to Department of Pediatrics, Yale University School of Medicine, 333 Cedar St, New Haven, CT 06510 (Dr Ehrenkranz).

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