Vitamin C

Vitamin C has crept into many a conversation I've had recently or article I've read. I feel like it's one of the things I should have paid more attention to at school, or listened to my mother about (you should eat more fruit!).

It was my wife that reminded me what the oncologists said when I started the last lot of chemo, they told me specifically to keep off vitamin C and fruits that were rich in it while I was being treated. I did think this was odd at the time but these minor things tend to get put to the back of your mind. Why no vitamin C, what does it do that interferes with the chemo?

http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/supplement/vitamin-c-ascorbic-acid

So vitamin C is basically vital to building and repairing stuff, generally keeping you healthy and a whole host of things. Boosting your immune system function seems a big one too. I wonder if this is why it's bad with chemo, which is trying to do the opposite - suppress it.

It's an antioxidant - combating free radicals (cue the mental image of a blueberry in combat gear suppressing the insurgents) which appear to be associated with a whole range of nasty things from cancer, to arthritis.

Strangely, for such a vital vitamin, the human body can not produce it. We have to get it all through diet.

When the Hodgkins returned, I also got a couple of other conditions that seem to have been sparked by it
- Uveitis
- Iritis
- Psoriatic Arthritis

Interestingly these "inflammatory" conditions (they campaign for UKIP?) seem to be the sort of thing vitamin C helps protect against.

I've been trying to find any literature that describes if taking vitamin C would help ward off or conversely increase the risk of relapsing again. I came across the following article, which is a "state of the nation" on Hodgkins

http://www.raschfoundation.org/reports/hodgkins/1/

It has an good section describing current research and treatments. There's a lot of articles about on high dose vitamin C (intravenous) as a treatment for non-Hodgkins , but not for Hodgkins.

Interestingly, vitamin D (there's a vitamin D council?!?) deficiency seems to be associated with Hodgkins and a lot of other cancers.

Back to vitamin C. It seems from what I can gather that it's all-round-good unless your on chemo, and even then there seem to be (surprise-surprise) conflicting data on whether it's good or not. How much should you take? Can you take too much? The NHS recommendation is 40mg per day, so the 500mg supplement I'm taking seems a bit overkill. The NHS recommends nothing over 1000mg or you may suffer nasty things like flatulence; or at least everyone else will. Suffer, that is.

Another interesting section in that first link was the interaction of vitamin C and NSAIDs (remembering I'm on long term aspirin)

• Aspirin and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) -- Both aspirin and NSAIDs can lower the amount of vitamin C in the body because they cause more of the vitamin to be lost in urine. In addition, high doses of vitamin C can cause more of these drugs to stay in the body, raising the levels in your blood. Some very early research suggests that vitamin C might help protect against stomach upset that aspirin and NSAIDs can cause. If you regularly take aspirin or NSAIDs, talk to your doctor before taking more than the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C.

Dagnammit. Is nothing ever straightforward? Given the low dose of aspirin I'm on (75mg) I think I'll be ok, but definitely a question at my next check-up. Along with fasting, a subject for another time.