It's Not Just For the Common Cold Anymore

I know a lot of people who believe in the vitamin C myth' that it helps to prevent or moderate the common cold. Well, it was a Nobel laureate who first promoted the idea in the nineteen seventies, but after fifty years of study, there's just little to support this. But Dave, a new study shows vitamin C may have an incredible lifesaving effect on a deadly illness: Sepsis.

Around one million people develop sepsis yearly in the US, with a third of them dying. Sepsis is the biggest killer of patients in US hospitals with about a thousand people dying every day. Sepsis occurs when the body mounts a wide scale, intense immune response to a microbe, bacterium, or fungus replicating in a person's bloodstream, usually from an infected wound.

This inflammatory response affects blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration leading to multi-organ failure and shock. In two-thousand-thirteen, it cost four hundred billion dollars to treat. Recently, researchers found a much cheaper and effective alternative in Vitamin C.

In this study, they gave septic patients high doses of vitamin C, B-one thiamine, and low dose corticosteroids. They treated forty seven patients and incredibly, only four died compared to a control group where nineteen people, or forty percent, died. In a follow-up study with one hundred fifty patients, only one person died from sepsis.

It's remarkable. Before doctors can use this treatment, though, larger, randomized studies are needed because high infusion of vitamin C could cause kidney problems.