Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 59, Issue 2, 15 January 2006, Pages 147-154
Biological Psychiatry

Original article
Impact of Selenium on Mood and Quality of Life: A Randomized, Controlled Trial

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.06.019Get rights and content

Background

Selenium is known to be important to the brain. Three small, published studies have suggested an effect of selenium supplementation or deprivation on mood in healthy volunteers. We investigated these findings on a much larger scale.

Methods

In this double-blind, placebo-controlled intervention, 501 UK participants aged 60–74 were randomly allocated to receive 100, 200 or 300 μg selenium/d as high-selenium yeast or placebo yeast. Mood (Profile of Moods States - Bipolar Form [POMS-BI] questionnaire), “quality of life” (Short Form 36 [SF-36] questionnaire) and plasma selenium were measured at baseline and six months.

Results

Supplementation significantly increased plasma selenium above baseline values: from an overall mean (SD) of 90(19) ng/g to 91(26), 144(27), 191(41) and 227(53) ng/g in the placebo, 100, 200, 300 μg selenium groups respectively (p < .001). Four hundred forty-eight participants completed the POMS-BI questionnaires at both time points, with no significant differences in total mood or mood-subscale scores seen between doses. After six months of supplementation, mean (SD) total mood scores for the four doses were 163(36), 161(37), 162(33), 162(34), F3,443 = .25, p = .86. Quality of life was similarly unaffected.

Conclusions

There was no evidence that selenium supplementation benefited mood or quality of life in these elderly volunteers. Though this is at odds with some previous results, our robust study design, much larger sample size and longer supplementation period, together with the evidence that the brain is a privileged site for selenium retention, suggest that this is a reliable finding.

Section snippets

Participants and Recruitment

The UK PRECISE pilot study was a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial involving volunteers from four general practices affiliated to the Medical Research Council General Practice Research Framework (GPRF). Practices were deliberately chosen from areas of England with differing demographic characteristics: Guisborough and Linthorpe (NorthEast), Bromsgrove (West Midlands) and Bungay (East Anglia). Research nurses recruited similar numbers of men and women from each of three age

Participants

Five hundred one participants were recruited between June 2000 and July 2001 (Figure 1). Participant flow through the study shows that data from 448 participants were included in the final analysis (Figure 1): their baseline characteristics are shown in Table 1.

Compliance with Treatment

Four hundred fifty three of the 467 participants (97%) who completed six months were compliant according to pill count. Nonprotocol use of over-the-counter selenium (“drop-ins”) was assessed by inspection of the histogram of plasma

Discussion

We set out to investigate whether we could confirm that selenium enhanced mood in a large, randomized, double-blind, multi-center, placebo-controlled trial. Our study is by far the largest to date to investigate the effect of selenium on mood in healthy individuals: 448 versus 91 participants in total in the other studies. In agreement with Hawkes and Hornbostel (1996) but in contrast to Benton and Cook (1991) and Finley and Penland (1998), we found no evidence that additional selenium enhanced

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