Researchers Establish Benefits of High-dose Vitamin C for Ovarian Cancer Patients
Few things infuriate the medical community more than the health claims for simple vitamin C. The fact that simple vitamin C is as effective or more effective than drugs is information they fight hard against, not wanting the public to know about or believe the many benefits related to vitamin C.
The FDA goes after companies or doctors who make health claims for vitamin C, and doctors can lose their license if they use vitamin C openly in their practice. (See: What happens to medical doctors who administer vitamins to patients? Answer: They lose their licenses!) According to the FDA, vitamin C is not approved as a drug, and therefore it is risky to use it professionally to cure anyone.
This is in spite of the fact that there are well over 200 diseases that vitamin C is effective in treating, which has been documented through research, including such distinguished scientists as Linus Pauling who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954.
So when another study is published from a major university in the United States on vitamin C, this time in its use for ovarian cancer patients, you can be sure it will cause a lot of contention in the medical field. We probably have Dr. Jeanne Drisko, M.D., director of the Integrative Medicine program at the University of Kansas to thank for getting this study published.
Researchers establish benefits of high-dose vitamin C for ovarian cancer patients
Scientists at the University of Kansas Medical Center have determined that high doses of vitamin C, administered intravenously with traditional chemotherapy, helped kill cancer cells while reducing the toxic effects of chemotherapy for some cancer patients.
By evaluating the therapy in cells, animals, and humans, the researchers found that a combination of infused vitamin C and the conventional chemotherapy drugs carboplatin and paclitaxel stopped ovarian cancer in the laboratory, and reduced chemotherapy-associated toxicity in patients with ovarian cancer. The results of their study have been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
“In the 1970s, ascorbate, or vitamin C, was an unorthodox therapy for cancer. It was safe, and there were anecdotal reports of its clinical effectiveness when given intravenously. But after oral doses proved ineffective in two cancer clinical trials, conventional oncologists abandoned the idea. Physicians practicing complementary and alternative medicine continued to use it, so we felt further study was in order,” explains the study’s senior author, Qi Chen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in KU Medical Center’s Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics and the Department of Integrative Medicine. “What we’ve discovered is that, because of its pharmacokinetic differences, intravenous vitamin C, as opposed to oral vitamin C, kills some cancer cells without harming normal tissues.”
The researchers’ clinical trial involved 27 patients with newly diagnosed Stage 3 or Stage 4 ovarian cancer. All of the participants received conventional therapy with paclitaxel or carboplatin, while some were also treated with high-dose intravenous vitamin C. Researchers monitored the participants for five years. Those patients who received vitamin C tended to experience fewer toxic effects from the chemotherapy drugs.
In laboratory rodents, the scientists observed that vitamin C was able to kill cancer cells at the concentrations achievable only by intravenous infusion, with no observable toxicity or pathological changes in the liver, kidney or spleen.
High-dose vitamin C is currently administered intravenously to thousands of patients by practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine. However, Drisko notes, conventional physicians remain skeptical about its therapeutic benefits. Given this current polarization of thought, the researchers sought to understand the cellular mechanisms by which pharmacologic vitamin C manifests its therapeutic benefit in cancer.
We Lost the War on Cancer – Review of Alternative Cancer Therapies
We have lost the war on cancer. At the beginning of the last century, one person in twenty would get cancer. In the 1940s it was one out of every sixteen people. In the 1970s it was one person out of ten. Today one person out of three gets cancer in the course of their life.
The cancer industry is probably the most prosperous business in the United States. In 2014, there will be an estimated 1,665,540 new cancer cases diagnosed and 585,720 cancer deaths in the US. $6 billion of tax-payer funds are cycled through various federal agencies for cancer research, such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI). The NCI states that the medical costs of cancer care are $125 billion, with a projected 39 percent increase to $173 billion by 2020.
The simple fact is that the cancer industry employs too many people and produces too much income to allow a cure to be found. All of the current research on cancer drugs is based on the premise that the cancer market will grow, not shrink.
John Thomas explains to us why the current cancer industry prospers while treating cancer, but cannot afford to cure it in Part I. In Part II, he surveys the various alternative cancer therapies that have been proven effective, but that are not approved by the FDA.
Scientists at the University of Kansas Medical Center have determined that high doses of vitamin C, administered intravenously with traditional chemotherapy, helped kill cancer cells while reducing the toxic effects of chemotherapy for some cancer patients.
By evaluating the therapy in cells, animals, and humans, the researchers found that a combination of infused vitamin C and the conventional chemotherapy drugs carboplatin and paclitaxel stopped ovarian cancer in the laboratory, and reduced chemotherapy-associated toxicity in patients with ovarian cancer. The results of their study have been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
"In the 1970s, ascorbate, or vitamin C, was an unorthodox therapy for cancer. It was safe, and there were anecdotal reports of its clinical effectiveness when given intravenously. But after oral doses proved ineffective in two cancer clinical trials, conventional oncologists abandoned the idea. Physicians practicing complementary and alternative medicine continued to use it, so we felt further study was in order," explains the study's senior author, Qi Chen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in KU Medical Center's Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics and the Department of Integrative Medicine. "What we've discovered is that, because of its pharmacokinetic differences, intravenous vitamin C, as opposed to oral vitamin C, kills some cancer cells without harming normal tissues."
The researchers' clinical trial involved 27 patients with newly diagnosed Stage 3 or Stage 4 ovarian cancer. All of the participants received conventional therapy with paclitaxel or carboplatin, while some were also treated with high-dose intravenous vitamin C. Researchers monitored the participants for five years. Those patients who received vitamin C tended to experience fewer toxic effects from the chemotherapy drugs.
In laboratory rodents, the scientists observed that vitamin C was able to kill cancer cells at the concentrations achievable only by intravenous infusion, with no observable toxicity or pathological changes in the liver, kidney or spleen.
Collaborating on the study at KU Medical Center were postdoctoral fellow Yan Ma and graduate student Kishore Polireddy in the Department of Pharmacology, Toxicology and Therapeutics; Jeanne Drisko, M.D., director of the Integrative Medicine program; and Julia Chapman, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Collaborating with the team was Mark Levine, M.D., at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.
High-dose vitamin C is currently administered intravenously to thousands of patients by practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine. However, Drisko notes, conventional physicians remain skeptical about its therapeutic benefits. Given this current polarization of thought, the researchers sought to understand the cellular mechanisms by which pharmacologic vitamin C manifests its therapeutic benefit in cancer.
"We aimed to investigate the mechanisms of vitamin C-induced cell death in the laboratory. And in patients with ovarian cancer, we conducted an early phase clinical trial examining safety and toxicity of high dose intravenous vitamin C. We now have a better understanding of vitamin C's anti-cancer action, plus a clear safety profile, and biological and clinical plausibility with a firm foundation to proceed," Drisko says. "Taken together, our data provide strong evidence to justify larger and robust clinical trials to definitively examine the benefit of adding vitamin C to conventional chemotherapy."