According to the latest (2020) Canadian Cancer Society statistics, 27.400 women will be diagnosed with Breast Cancer that year, and 5100 will die from the same disease, and this represented almost 13% of all cancer deaths among women in 2020. https://cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/cancer-types/breast/statistics
The standard medical care for Breast Cancer is Surgery, Chemotherapy, Radiation, Hormonal treatment, and Biologics. The introduction of Natural Health Products to Oncology Care has been recently adopted by some Oncology Centers. Up to 75% of cancer patients use herbal and natural health products whether they share this with their oncologist or not https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3065283/
The topic today is High Dose Intravenous Vitamin C and Breast Cancer A New Research. For many decades, Vitamin C has been used for general health support, especially supporting the immune system and helping the fight against viruses and flu. For that reason, it is recommended to use a small dose of Vitamin C that ranges between 2000 mg- 10,000 mg daily. Taking higher doses of Vitamin C by mouth beyond the 10,000 mg is not possible as the gut will not absorb doses higher than the 10,000 mg as there is a ceiling effect on the gut which means that with the 10,000 mg the gut cannot absorb any more of the vitamin C.
So, higher doses of vitamin C can only be given by intravenous route, which would bypass gut absorption and ensure that almost 100% of the vitamin C is available in the circulation.
The question now, is what is the value of having higher doses of Vitamin C over its lower doses? For Oncology Care, higher doses of Vitamin C support Oncology Treatments in two ways first by inducing an anti-inflammatory state in the body and this facilitates other Oncological Interventions such as Radiation therapy or Chemotherapy and reducing their side effects, and second, by acting as a Pro Oxidants which means that it has an anti-Cancer effect with is synergistic with the other Oncology Interventions.
Today’s topic is a discussion of recent research published in May 2021 by Mansoor et al at Cereus Journal.
In this research, women with Breast Cancer Stages IIA- IIIB were included whereby a total of 350 patients were randomized to either a study group who received a high dose of Intravenous Vitamin C at 25 Grams weekly in addition to the standard oncology care and a control group who received the standard oncology care alone and a Placebo (Intravenous Saline drip only ).
After 4 weeks of these interventions, it was found that patients enrolled in the study group (who had received the high dose Intravenous Vitamin C) had very low toxicity symptoms from chemotherapy as compared to the standard group (who received only chemotherapy) such as nausea (p-value: 0.0003, loss of appetite p = 0.007, tumor-related pain p <0.001, fatigue p< 0.001, and insomnia p<0.001.
So, in conclusion, this study demonstrated that the introduction of the High Dose Intravenous Vitamin C to the standard Oncology Care for Breast Cancer Patients can significantly improve the Toxicity and the Side effects profile of the standard oncology treatments, and it is recommended to adopt a similar research idea to have more information about the benefits of using the High Dose Intravenous Vitamin C for patients with Breast Cancer during active Oncology Treatments.
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