Vitamin E is a fat-soluble vitamin with antioxidant effects. Patients with ataxia with vitamin E deficiency (AVED), caused by a-tocopherol transfer protein gene mutations, are affected by ataxia, loss of neurons, retrinal atrophy, massive accumulation of lipofuscin in neurons and retinitis pigmentosa. Certain diseases, like abetalipoproteinemia, chronic cholestatic liver disease, cystic fibrosis, chronic pancreatitis, progressive systemic sclerosis, short-bowel syndrome or several other lipid malabsorption syndromes are associated with a low efficiency of vitamin E uptake leading to similar symptoms as in AVED. These symptoms clearly can be prevented and in some situation reversed by supplemental vitamin E. It has recently been reported that vitamin E prevents cardiovascular disease in diabetic patients with the haptoglobin 2-2 genotype and is effective for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. These current clinical topics on vitamin E are reviewed in this article.

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Direct measurements of the interaction forces between surfaces are critical to understand the aggregation-dispersion behaviour of colloidal particles in dispersed systems. The interaction forces between solid surfaces in solutions, therefore, have been measured in a large variety of systems over a past few decades. Recently, much effort has been paid to enable direct measurements of the surface forces between “soft” interface, which show large deformation in solutions such as oil droplets, bubbles, lipid layers and cell surfaces, adopting atomic force microscopy techniques. It is the purpose of this review to illustrate how the interactions between surfaces including such soft interfaces can be measured and to summarise the current literature describing such experiments.

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