IV Vitamin C Therapy in Cancer Patients

One of the IV vitamin therapy treatments we offer at the IV Therapy Center of Beverly Hills is intravenous high-dose Vitamin C therapy.  There are manydiseases and conditions for which we have found this treatment to be at least somewhat helpful, and this is backed up by numerous reports in the medical literature.  Our patients have found that IV Vitamin C therapy: 
·         Reduces  allergy symptoms 
·         Shortens the duration of colds and flu (Vitamin C has a known virucidal effect) 
·         Helps boost energy in cases of fatigue; and 
·         Speeds healing after surgery.  

Studies suggest that patients with a history of gout who take over 1,500 mg. a day of Vitamin C have a much lower incidence of painful acute gout attacks. Depression sufferers benefit from it because your body requires Vitamin C to make the key neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin.  And the list goes on. 

The Big C: The Cancer and Vitamin C Connection 
As an IV therapy clinic offering intravenous high-dose Vitamin C, we at the IV Therapy Center of Beverly Hills are occasionally approached by patients with cancer who are seeking to use IV Vitamin C as a so-called “alternative therapy,” even though we do not promote it for this purpose.  Because of the frequent inquiries we receive on this topic, we thought we should give you some background on it, state our positions based on some of the more recent research, and let you make up your mind.

 Background and Initial Skepticism
 Two-time Nobel laureate Dr. Linus Pauling became a crusader for high-dose vitamin C therapy in the ‘70s, touting it as a cure for cancer and many other ailments.  Despite his impeccable credentials, there was - and still is - widespread resistance to the idea. His detractors said there just weren’t any reproducible studies that could prove the dramatic results Pauling claimed. Interest in Vitamin C as a cancer treatment soon waned, and the field lay dormant for over 20 years.

What many people today don’t realize is that Pauling’s initial studies used orally administered Vitamin C; upper dose levels were limited by the fact that the majority of Vitamin C, as a water-soluble vitamin, was excreted in the urine. IV administration combats this problem in that it allows megadoses of active vitamin to be delivered throughout the bloodstream, therefore bringing it into contact with cancer cells all over the body (please see our Benefits page on our site, which discusses this).

A Fresh Look at IV Vitamin C and its Effects on Cancer 
A more recent crop of studies has generated positive results that have researchers cautiously optimistic. In 2006, there was this report of three caseshttp://www.cmaj.ca/content/174/7/937.abstract; 

Then in 2008, we saw this press release from the National Institutes of Health:

Vitamin C Injections Slow Tumor Growth in MiceHigh-dose injections of vitamin C, also known as ascorbate or ascorbic acid, reduced tumor weight and growth rate by about 50 percent in mouse models of brain, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers, researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) report in the August 5, 2008, issue of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers traced ascorbate’s anti-cancer effect to the formation of hydrogen peroxide in the extracellular fluid surrounding the tumors. Normal cells were unaffected.

How Does Vitamin C Interact with Chemo? 
Some oncologists have worried that Vitamin C might interfere with – or actually undermine – most standard chemotherapy treatments.  If Vitamin C is a safe, relatively harmless compound, why would they even think this? The answer lies in the way chemotherapy works: by destroying fast-multiplying cancer cells. In order to kill cells, cancer or otherwise, you have to give medications that stop cell growth. Stopping cell growth means either stopping DNA from reproducing by fooling it with a DNA base that is essentially a Trojan horse, or by stopping other normal parts of mitosis (the cell-dividing cycle).  Compounds that do this are highly toxic by necessity. When they kill cancer cells, it’s all good. When they kill normal cells (which most chemo drugs can’t discern as being different from cancer cells), patients lose their hair, develop mouth sores, throw up, and suffer a host of unpleasant side effects. 

 Many chemo drugs are oxidants and produce free radicals known as ROS (reactive oxygen species). You already are familiar with certain types of ROS, such as hydrogen peroxide, which perform important functions in the body.  Inside a maniacally reproducing cancer cell, the microenvironment is one in which antioxidants predominate and there’s nary a free radical to be found.  So for cancer patients, antioxidant foods and antioxidant vitamins are a bad thing; here, they only serve to embolden the already-overconfident cancer cells, and – as Nobel prize-winner Jim Watson has argued, to aid and abet the awful process of metastasis.  But Vitamin C is not just an antioxidant; it can be a pro-oxidant too.

The Two Faces of C 
Antioxidant and pro-oxidant properties in the same molecule? Yes, it appears that this strange duality is what exists in Vitamin C. At low doses (under 500 mg), Vitamin C is the antioxidant we’re all familiar with, but at high-doses, under certain physiologic conditions such as cancer being treated with ROD-generating chemo drugs, Vitamin C is an oxidant that is thought to work by generating hydrogen peroxide intracellularly;  this helps the cancer cell-killing process. 

So Where Does This Leave Patients? 
Intravenous high-dose Vitamin C is NOT a cancer treatment in and of itself, nor do we claim it to be such. It should only be used as an adjunct to chemotherapy, radiation and other approved cancer treatment modalities. If you are cleared medically and your oncologist approves, we may administer it as adjunctive therapy to see if it can help improve treatment outcomes. Treatment must be carefully coordinated with your existing regimen.

Intravenous Vitamin C as Supportive Therapy
In addition to the uses described above, high-dose vitamin C has been shown to help reduce the problem of cachexia (wasting syndrome) in cancer patients. So in patients suffering from this troublesome loss of body mass and muscle, IV Vitamin C may be a viable option as nutritional support.