Antioxidants and Alzheimer's disease: time to stop feeding vitamin E to dementia patients?

In 1974 one of us attended a lecture on aging by the Nobel prize winning immunologist, Sir Macfarlane Burnet. Burnet indicated that oxidative stress was central to the aging process, and that interventions to ameliorate this process should prolong the human lifespan and diminish the incidence of age-related diseases, one of the most important of which is, of course, Alzheimer’s disease (AD). A decade after this lecture was given, Burnet died of rectal carcinoma – a typical age-related disease. Thirty three years on, has the field advanced at all?