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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Vitamin C has an array of proven health benefits, but new research shows it may do more harm than good when it comes to fighting cancer.
Vitamin C appears to substantially reduce the effectiveness of anticancer drugs, like chemotherapy. Researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York studied both laboratory cancer cells and mice and believe the same mechanisms theyve uncovered may affect patient outcomes as well.
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Previous studies have suggested that because vitamin C is an antioxidant, it may be beneficial to cancer patients. But this new study suggests that the antioxidant properties of vitamin C are the properties that help cancer cells to thrive. This happens because some classes of chemotherapy drugs produce oxygen free radicals, these unpaired oxygen molecules can fatally react with molecules in a cancer cell causing cell death. Vitamin C could stop these radicals, keeping cancer cells alive despite chemotherapy treatment.
Researchers found that every chemotherapy drug they tested did not work as well if cancer cells were pretreated with vitamin C, as they did on cells that were not treated with vitamin C.
Study authors note that cancer patients should eat a healthy diet, which includes foods rich in vitamin C. Its the larger doses of over-the-counter vitamin C that researchers found worrisome.
SOURCE: Cancer Research, 2008;68:8031-8038
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