A response by the Linus Pauling Institute to an article published in the February 2009 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

A study published recently in the medical journal Archives of Internal Medicine (Arch Intern Med. 2009;169(3):294-304), which followed 161,808 women from the Women's Health Initiative over eight years, claimed to provide "convincing evidence that multivitamin use has little or no influence on the risk of common cancers, cardiovascular disease, or total mortality in postmenopausal women." This message was immediately sent around the world by the news media, leading people everywhere to believe that taking a daily multivitamin does no good and is a waste of money. Is it, really? Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.

High intakes of vitamin C may protect against blood pressure increases in young women, according to a new study from the US.

Researchers, led by Gladys Block from the University of California, Berkeley, report that a one mg per decilitre increase in blood vitamin C levels was linked to a 4.1 and 4.0 mmHg in systolic and diastolic blood pressures.

The study, said to be the first to report a relationship between blood vitamin C levels and blood pressure in young women with normal blood pressure, is published in the open-access Nutrition Journal.

“Lowering BP or attenuating increases in BP in healthy young adults may lead to lower BP in older adults and reduced risk of age-associated vascular events,” wrote the authors.

“This study suggests that vitamin C may be an important factor in BP regulation even among health young adults, and that further study is warranted.”

A study published on November 12th in the Journal of the American Medical Association (The Physicians' Health Study II) reported that supplemental vitamin C (500 mg/day) or vitamin E (400 IU of synthetic vitamin E every other day) did not reduce the incidence of cardiovascular events, including heart attack and stroke, or death from cardiovascular disease in a group of 14,641 male physicians in the U.S. in a ten-year period.

The findings challenge earlier work showing the vitamin had no benefit to cancer, because the latest study found an effective dose can only be given by concentrated infusion into the bloodstream

The US Government team that reports the work today say that it provides the "first firm basis" for using the treatment on patients. Trials are now being planned.

The interest in the vitamin dates back to 1948 when a doctor - William McCormick - speculated about an anti-cancer effect of vitamin C and this idea was followed up in the early Seventies by the Scot Ewan Cameron and the late Nobel laureate Linus Pauling.

Many of us take vitamin C to ward off a cold, but research is finding that in large doses, the antioxidant might also be a cancer killer. A number of studies have found that large infusions of vitamin C can kill or block the growth of cancer cells while sparing healthy cells, according to a commentary published in the August 12 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS Back in 1973, American scientist Linus Pauling and Scottish doctor Ewan Cameron investigated the use of vitamin C in cancer patients. They theorized that vitamin C inhibits tumor growth, in part by triggering an immune response. Their research was intriguing enough that the National Cancer Institute (NCI) launched two subsequent studies on the subject at the Mayo Clinic.

AIM: Hypothetically, supplementation with the antioxidant vitamins C could alleviate exercise-induced lipid peroxidation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of vitamin C supplementation on exercise-induced lipid peroxidation, muscle damage and inflammation.

In the rapidly expanding market of dietary supplements, it is possible to find vitamin C in many different forms with any number of claims regarding its efficacy or bioavailability. Bioavailability refers to the degree to which a nutrient (or drug) becomes available to the target tissue after it has been administered. We reviewed the literature for the results of scientific research on the bioavailability of different forms of vitamin C.

Higher Plasma Vitamin C Concentration Predicts Lower Risk of Stroke Background Vitamin C (ascorbic acid), an essential nutrient found primarily in fruit and vegetables, functions as an antioxidant, protecting DNA, proteins, and lipids from free radical damage. Epidemiologic studies have suggested that high circulating vitamin C concentrations are related to lower risk of cardiovascular disease including stroke, although randomized intervention trials have not supported this effect.