Vitamin C Boosts Chemotherapy

Vitamin C has been discovered to help boost the effectiveness according to a study published in Science Translational Medicine.

It's not exactly like drinking your orange juice in the morning, but researchers have found that administering the vitamin intravenously helps promote the killing of cancer cells during chemotherapy treatments. Better yet, the same large doses of vitamin C helped protect normal cells from the negative effects of the cancer treatments.

According to the study, the researchers first exposed samples of human ovarian cancer cells in a lab to heavy doses of vitamin C. Evidence suggested that in some cases the vitamin caused the cancer cells to suffer DNA damage while normal cells were left unharmed. A test on mice also preformed indicated  that the vitamin helped chemotherapy inhibit the growth of tumors or shrink them.

Lastly, 27 patients with stage II or stage IV ovarian cancer were tested in clinical trials. Patients who received heavy doses of intravenous vitamin C along with their chemotherapy appeared to take an average of 8.75 months longer to relapse, compared to patients who received only the chemotherapy.

Still, researchers noted that for the significance of these findings to truly be set in stone, much more research would be needed.

And that's not likely to happen. According to WebMD, the potential for vitamin C in cancer treatment hasn't been taken seriously by modern medicine practices for the last 40 years. Too much inconclusive research over the years has put the results of small-sample studies such as this open to much dispute.

Still, this did not stop the researchers of this most recent study to claim that extremely positive results such as the ones they found are more than enough reason to justify funding for larger clinical trials.

The study was published by Science Translational Medicine on February 5, 2014.