Check Up: Vitamin C vs. cancer: 'Encouraging'

A small study focused on the big question of whether intravenous Vitamin C fights cancer has yielded "somewhat encouraging findings," some Thomas Jefferson University researchers conclude.

Many alternative medicine practitioners are firmly convinced that ascorbic acid infusions work, based on anecdotal cases of remissions and cures. But the evidence remains inconclusive.

In the new study, nine patients with advanced pancreatic cancer received intravenous C plus two standard chemotherapy drugs for eight weeks. CT scans showed eight of the nine patients had shrinkage of their pancreas tumors. That's unusual with chemo alone, the researchers say.

"This is a horrible disease that doesn't respond to much. We wanted to see if we at least got an efficacy signal," said study leader Daniel Monti, director of Jefferson's integrative medicine center. "And we did."

But the shrinkage did not change the patients' grim prognosis. On average, their disease progressed in three months, and they died in six months - comparable to studies of chemotherapy alone.

Vitamin C was ardently championed as a cancer therapy 35 years ago by two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. His theory was scorned after two large, federally funded trials found no benefit - and he began touting ascorbate for ills from colds to mental illness.

Newer research suggests those trials had a fatal flaw: The patients took Vitamin C in pill form. Mark Levine, a nutrition researcher at the National Institutes of Health and senior author of the Jefferson study, has published lab and animal studies showing that Vitamin C is toxic to cancer cells - but only at very high blood levels, which can be achieved only by putting ascorbate directly into a vein.

While he has long called for new trials, Jefferson is among the few institutions willing to revisit the C controversy.

As expected, the new study - published last week in the journal PLOS One - showed ascorbate plus chemo was safe. Given that, plus the tumor shrinkage, Jefferson has launched the next step: a trial in which 35 advanced pancreatic cancer patients will get 16 weeks of C plus chemo. - Marie McCullough