Vitamin Information Center

Vitamin C jabs are the new ray of hope for cancerdefine patients with poor chances and few treatment options as a new study found that injecting high dose of vitamin C instead of swallowed can destroy cancer.

The super high doses of vitamin C jabs halves the size of brain, ovarian and pancreatic tumours in mice, destroying cancerdefine cells while leaving healthy tissue unharmed. The researchers said that the vitamin may be reacting with the cancer cell chemicals to make acid.

The lead author of the study, Dr Qi Chen, from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland conducted the experiment on mice with aggressive forms of ovarian, brain and pancreatic cancer.

One group of mice was given high super doses of vitamin C jabs (up to 4grams per kilo of body weight) while another group wasn’t given any vitamin. The researchers found that the injections caused the growth and weight of tumours to drop by nearly 50 percent, while in untreated mice, the disease spread rapidly to other organs. There were no signs the cancer had spread in the treated mice.

The US team wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “The daily treatment significantly decreased growth rates of ovarian, pancreatic and glioblastoma tumours established in mice”.

Adding further they said, “Similar pharmacologic concentrations were readily achieved in humans given ascorbate intravenously. This data suggests that ascorbate as a prodrug may have benefits in cancers with poor prognosisdefine and limited therapeutic options.”

The authors are suggesting that after these successful tests in mice now treatment should be considered for human use at similar levels.

While on the other hand, Cancer Research UK cautioned that other studies suggested high doses of vitamin C might interfere with existing therapies and make them less effective.

Dr Alison Ross, of Cancer Research UK, said: ‘This is encouraging work but it’s at a very early stage because it involves cells grown in the lab and mice. Much more research is needed before we’ll know whether vitamin C could be a viable cancer treatment.’

Vitamin C (chemical name ascorbate) has been part of complementary or alternative cancer treatment for more than 30 years.

It is generally used as hair bleach and now the study shows that it kills cancer cells without harming healthy tissue, which means that the cancer treatment should be free of nausea, pain and hair loss many times associated with cancer medications and would also have the added advantage of being cheap.

Previous studies show that higher intake of vitamin C reduce human risk for gastricdefine, esophageal, pancreatic and lung cancer. Patients with higher levels of ascorbate have been shown to have lower risk of both coronary heart disease, stroke and cataract development.

Patients turn to alternatives
As many as 61 percent of cancer patients use complementary therapies such as prayer, relaxation, meditation and massage, researchers from the American Cancer Society report.

For the study, published in the Sept. 1 issue of Cancer, researchers collected data on 4,139 cancer survivors. Of these, 61.4 percent of the patients used prayer; 44.3 percent used relaxation techniques; 42.4 percent used faith/spiritual healing; 40.1 percent used nutritional supplements such as vitamins; 15 percent used meditation; 11.2 percent used massage; and 9.7 percent participated in support groups.

On the other hand, only 0.4 percent of the patients used hypnosis; 1 percent used biofeedback therapy; and 1.2 percent used acupressure or acupuncture.

The benefits of these therapies are still unclear, researchers said.

Older neighborhoods good for you
People who live in older neighborhoods appear less likely to be overweight, according to a new study. The key, the researchers say, is walkability. Older communities encourage people to drive less and walk more, they said, because they tend to have better sidewalks, shady trees and businesses nearby to walk to.

The study, which is to appear in the September issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, looked at the fitness and address information of more than 450,000 residents of Salt Lake County in Utah. With each extra decade of a neighborhood’s age, the researchers said, the risk of obesity was 13 percent lower for men and 8 percent lower for women.

Vitamin C used against cancer
New research with mice suggests that intravenous doses of vitamin C could one day reduce the size of cancerous tumors in people. The findings are preliminary and still must be confirmed in humans.

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that intravenous vitamin C produced hydrogen peroxide, which reduced cancerous tumors in the mice by 43 percent to 51 percent.

A diet lacking in B vitamins may result in cognitive problems, new findings suggest.

Vitamin B deficiency could result in cognitive impairment, according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Centre on Ageing (HNRCA) at Tufts University found that mice given a diet which was deficient in three B-vitamins showed cognitive dysfunction as well as reductions in both brain capillary length and density.

The mice deficient in B-vitamins took longer to perform tasks such as navigating a water maze.

Dr Aron Troen, lead author of the study and assistant professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, commented: “Mice fed a diet deficient in folate and vitamins B12 and B6 demonstrated significant deficits in spatial learning and memory compared with normal mice.”

Meanwhile, a separate study has suggested that regular walking could have a positive effect for people with memory problems.

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that individuals aged over 50 who go walking for over two-and-a-half hours a week can see significant improvements in memory problems

A few weeks back, I received a call from a hopeful patient asking for confirmation of a nightly news story – one claiming that bacon might be good for the heart because of the nitrite and nitrate it contains.

Sounds surprising? After all, cured meats are often shunned over concerns that nitrite and nitrate, added to retain color and inhibit the growth of the bacteria that cause botulism, may form potentially carcinogenic compounds called nitrosamines.

The story stemmed from a report published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston studied mice consuming either a nitrate/nitrite-deficient diet or one high in nitrate and nitrite to study effects on the heart after a simulated heart attack. (A third group of mice consumed a regular diet as a control.)

The mice receiving extra nitrate and nitrite in their drinking water had 48% less heart cell death than mice on the regular diet, while mice fed the low nitrate/nitrite diet had 59% greater injury than the controls And 77% of the animals receiving extra nitrate/nitrite survived the heart attack, compared with 58% that were nitrate/nitrite-deficient.

The researchers proposed that the benefit from the enriched water might be the stimulation of nitric oxide production in the body. Nitric oxide, produced in cells lining the surface of the blood vessels, is a gas that dilates arteries, thus aiding blood flow and reducing blood pressure. When inadequate nitric oxide is available, the risk rises for heart disease and stroke.

Nitric oxide is generated from oxygen and an amino acid, arginine, but can also be produced from dietary nitrate by other pathways. Unbeknownst to most people, the majority of the nitrate we consume – between 70% and 85% – comes from vegetables and fruits, the richest sources being spinach, lettuce, celery, cauliflower, grapes, strawberries and root vegetables. (Vegetarians may consume up to 10 times the nitrate levels that omnivores do.)

Only about 5% of the nitrate we eat comes from bacon, ham and other cured meats. The rest comes from nitrate naturally present in drinking water.

Once nitrate is absorbed by the small intestine, as much as 25% is taken up from the bloodstream by the salivary glands, where it is concentrated tenfold to twentyfold. Bacteria in the mouth then convert the nitrate to nitrite, and further enzymatic activity in blood and tissues leads to the production of nitric oxide.

Although nitrate and nitrite are not carcinogenic – in fruits and vegetables, in fact, they act as antioxidants – during digestion or cooking, nitrite can combine with naturally occurring amines in foods, forming nitrosamines. Some nitrosamines have been shown to be carcinogenic when administered to animals.

But it’s unclear, given the nitrate content of the typical human diet, if nitrosamines can be formed in the stomach in large enough doses to induce cancer. In fact, there is some compelling evidence that this is unlikely: Studies of human populations indicate that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables protects against several forms of cancer, particularly gastric cancer.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn’t seem plausible that Mother Nature would have purposely allowed secretion of concentrated nitrate in the mouth if it were harmful to us. But that doesn’t mean that bacon is the new health food.

Even if cured meats might add a bit of nitrate or nitrite to our day’s intake, there is often a fair amount of fat and sodium tagging along.

What’s more, fruits and vegetables are naturally rich in vitamin C, which inhibits nitrosamine formation as well as enhances the generation of nitric oxide from nitrite.

I am sure my patient was disappointed, but I told him that we were designed to consume our nitrate in more natural ways – packaged with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytochemicals in a multitude of healthful vegetables and fruits.

–

Susan Bowerman is a registered dietitian and assistant director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition.

Bacterial fuel cells could be used in wastewater treatment plants, among other applications.

Even bacteria need vitamins.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have learned that riboflavin is the secret ingredient that makes shewanella bacteria capable of converting compounds such as lactic acid into electricity.

Riboflavin is also known as vitamin B-2.

“Scientists have known for years that shewanella produce electricity,” said study co-author Daniel Bond, a microbiologist at University of Minnesota’s BioTechnology Institute. “Now we know how they do it.”

Shewanella use the electricity they generate to get access to metals such as iron.

The scientists demonstrated that the bacteria grown on electrodes naturally produced riboflavin to carry the electrons from the cells to the metal tips.

As the vitamin’s levels increased in the bacteria, the electricity generated nearly quadrupled. When the riboflavin was removed from the bacteria, electron transfer decreased by over 70 percent.

The results suggest that shewanella or other electricity-generating bacteria could be used to power microbial fuel cells. These cells, in turn, could clean up wastewater in a treatment facility, or even run remote ocean floor sensors.

“Bacteria have been changing the chemistry of the environment for billions of years,” said Jeffrey Gralnick, Bond’s colleague and study co-author. “Their ability to make iron soluble is key to metal cycling in the environment and essential to most life on earth.”

Bond and Gralnick caution, however, that more research is needed before considering larger-scale applications for microbial fuel cells such as powering vehicles or homes.

The researchers received funding for their work from the U.S. Navy to study the process of reversing metal corrosion on ships.

The study was published in the the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.