Vitamin A and cancer

Every year there are 125,000 deaths from cancer in England and it seems ironic that one of the most promising cancer preventative agents to come from several decades and hundreds of millions of pounds spent on cancer research should be a long‐known essential nutrient. Nevertheless, retinol (vitamin A) and its analogues (retinoids) have been shown to have wide‐ranging effects on the promotion and growth of tumours in animals, and a good deal of human epidemiology is now focussed on the effect of dietary vitamin A on cancer incidence.