Intravenous Vitamin C Gaining More Attention for Its Cancer Fighting Benefits

This post could save your life – or the life of someone close to you.

Thirty years ago, Nobel laureate Linus Pauling advocated high-dose vitamin C as part of the treatment of cancer. His recommendations were based on a small number of patients who had been given either oral or intravenous (IV) vitamin C. Subsequent clinical trials at the Mayo Clinic failed to demonstrate any benefits from oral vitamin C, and the therapy was rejected by conventional medicine.

Recent experimental studies, however, have found that IV vitamin C can raise blood levels of vitamin C 25 to 70 times higher than those achievable through oral supplements. That’s significant because such high doses are toxic to cancer cells, but not normal cells.

To explain, large amounts of oral vitamin C increase blood levels up to 70 to 220 μmol/L – far less than the 1,000 μmol/L needed to destroy many types of cancer cells. With IV vitamin C, blood concentrations can be increased up to 14,000 μmol/L of blood. In a report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Mark Levine, MD, PhD, of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and his colleagues described three people treated with IV vitamin C and other supplements. Two of the patients are still alive, and the third (a long-standing cigarette smoker) lived much longer than expected.

One of the cases was a 49-year-old man diagnosed in 1996 with a primary bladder cancer that was starting to metastasize. The tumors were removed surgically, and the patient declined chemo and radiation therapy. The patient decided to receive IV vitamin C at the Bright Spot for Health, a nutritional medicine clinic in Wichita, Kansas. He received two 30-gram IVs weekly for three months, followed by 30 grams once every month or so for four years. “Now, nine years after diagnosis, the patient is in good health with no symptoms of recurrence or metastasis,” wrote Levine and his coauthors.

In a separate report published in the Puerto Rico Health Sciences Journal, doctors described the safety of high-dose IV vitamin C in 24 late-stage terminal cancer patients. The patients were given 10,000 to 50,000 mg of IV vitamin C daily. Most had been deficient in vitamin C before treatment, and side effects were infrequent and mild.

Levine and his colleagues believe that vitamin C produces large amounts of hydrogen peroxide, a potent generator of free radicals, inside tumors. The mechanism is similar to conventional chemotherapy, but without the side effects.

However, a recent report in the journal Nature suggests another mechanism to vitamin C’s benefits. Cancer cells produce large amounts of the enzyme lysyl oxidase, which promotes metastasis. However, an earlier study found that vitamin C inhibited the activity of lysyl oxidase.

If you'd like to read the scientific basis for what I've written, check out the references below at www.pubmed.gov. For more general information on nutrition and health, explore my website at www.nutritionreporter.com

Scientific References: Padayatty SJ, Riordan HD, Hewitt SM, et al. Intravenously administered vitamin C as cancer therapy: three cases. CMAJ, 2006;174:937-942. Riordan HD, Casciari JJ, Gonzalez MJ, et al. A pilot clinical study of continuous intravenous ascorbate in terminal cancer patients. Puerto Rico Health Sciences Journal, 2005;24:269-276. Erler JT, Bennewith KL, Nicolau M, et al. Lysyl oxidase is essential for hypoxia- induced metastasis. Nature, 2006;440:1222-1226. Kuroyanagi M, Shimamura E, Kim M, et al. Effects of L-ascorbic acide on lysyl oxidase in the formation of collagen cross-links. Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry, 2002;66:2077-2082.