Vitamin C may treat cancer after all
Despite Nobel laureate Linus Pauling’s advocacy of vitamin C as a way for people to battle cancer, research has rarely found that doses of the nutrient affect the course of the disease. However, a new investigation shows that vitamin C could be an effective cancer fighter after all, but only when taken intravenously.
Mark Levine of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases in Bethesda, Md., and his colleagues had previously found that people quickly clear vitamin C from their bodies when it’s taken orally, so their blood concentrations stay low. When the nutrient was delivered intravenously, however, volunteers’ blood concentrations of the vitamin were up to 70 times as high as they were with oral dosing. These high blood concentrations didn’t appear to have any harmful effects on the study participants.