107-135 Dietary Supplements
pp 131-133 Vitamin C : Note new research just published (02.14) from Drisko’s group at U. of Kansas reporting on the benefits of IV vitamin C along with Carbo and Taxol in patients with ovarian cancer (see here), only problem being a very small number of patients were involved in the pilot trial reported (n=25). This at least puts a further dent into the theory that anti-oxidants is contra-indicated during conventional chemotherapy. Right now, there appears to be at least 8 trials going on to investigate IV vitamin C in cancer currently (see here), but I still maintain that larger trials are urgently needed to establish the benefit of IV vitamin C for cancer.
There is a long overdue systematic meta-analysis cum objective review on vitamin C treatment in cancer by Fritz et al. published Jul 2014 in Integrative Cancer Therapies (vol 13, Jul ’14 pp 280 – 300). Some important conclusions are drawn: 1) There is no data that high dose IV vitamin C is useful as a stand-alone anti-cancer treatment, 2) The only one randomized controlled trial available indicated that intravenous vitamin C + chemo for ovarian cancer may improve time to relapse as well as reduce side-effects, and this is supported by a number of inconclusive phase I/II and observational studies, 3) vitamin C as cancer treatment is safe, with no evidence of increased toxicity to patients, 4) there is no evidence for any negative interactions in clinical studies thus far conducted.
