 If you are taking chemotherapy to treat your cancer, perhaps you should lay off those vitamin C tablets.
The antioxidant vitamin C is a class of molecule that is known to help prevent cancer by removing oxygen-free radicals from the body, but researchers in the United States have recently found that taking vitamin C supplements while receiving chemotherapy may reduce the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs.
The study was carried out by Dr Mark Heaney and colleagues of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and was recently published in Cancer Research. In the study, the researchers took human cancer cells and grew them in vitro with vitamin C, and chemotherapy drugs were added to see if they had effects on the vitamin C. The study found that with the addition of vitamin C, chemotherapy drugs killed between 30 and 70 percent fewer cancer cells than when vitamin C was not added. The researchers implanted mice with human cancer cells and gave the mice vitamin C before giving them chemotherapy treatments. The tumors grew at a more rapid pace in the mice given the vitamin C.
The chemotherapy drugs used in the experiments were Cisplatin, doxorubicin, methotrexate, vincristine, and gleevec. In response to the results, Dr Mark Heaney said, “The vitamin C didn’t neutralize the effects of the chemotherapy drugs, but it blunted their effects. Vitamin C is something everyone needs to have in their diet or you can develop scurvy. But I don’t recommend taking supplemental vitamin C during that period of time that my patients are receiving chemotherapy.”