Vitamin C: cancer's friend or foe?

摘要

Could injecting vitamin C into the blood help to treat cancer? That's what a study in mice suggests - and trials are already under way to test such injections in people. But the preliminary result could prompt desperate patients to take large doses of the vitamin, which some cancer specialists fear may interfere with standard cancer drugs and radiation therapy, reducing their effectiveness. Excitement over vitamin C as a cancer treatment grew in the 1970s after the Nobel prizewinning chemist Linus Pauling suggested that it extended the lives of terminally ill patients. In 1985, however, two trials found that taking vitamin C pills orally had no effect.