A Cheap Daily Vitamin Shows Promise For People at Risk of Leukemia, Early Trial Finds

A Cheap Daily Vitamin Shows Promise For People at Risk of Leukemia, Early Trial Finds

One way of beating certain cancers could be to stop them from developing in the first place, and there's a growing interest in using vitamin C to tackle pre-cancer blood disorders and early-stage blood cancers.

Vitamin C levels are often chronically low in people with blood cancers, and there's long been debate about whether topping up these levels might work as a cancer therapy.

So far, the evidence has been pretty mixed.

To gather more data – specifically on vitamin C's effects before the cancer properly gets started – a team led by researchers from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the Van Andel Institute has now completed a phase 2 clinical trial involving 109 participants.

The results, published in Cancer, show that a daily oral dose of 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C was linked to a 65 percent lower risk of death compared to a placebo group, in an exploratory analysis over a three-year follow-up.

"We are tremendously excited and cautiously optimistic that our results could one day translate into a simple way to improve care and outcomes for people with pre-leukemia disorders," says e...