Taking a daily multivitamin didn’t improve survival or reduce the risk that colon cancer would come back for stage III patients enrolled in a clinical trial of chemotherapy after surgery.

Although about half of patients in the trial took a multivitamin supplement during their treatment, the vitamin didn’t improve their outcomes, nor did it reduce side effects.  At the same time, multivitamin use didn’t have a detrimental effect. Read the rest of this entry »

Media ads for prescription drugs prompted 7.5 percent of people in a recent survey to ask their doctor about a prescription.

But the doctors only agreed about a third of the time.

They were more likely to go ahead and write a prescription when the person asking was over 65.  Almost half of seniors (46.4 percent) were given a prescription for a medicine that they saw advertised and asked their doctor about.

In the same survey, 6 out of 10 people said that ads for nutritional supplements weren’t trustworthy, but 12 percent bought the supplements based on the ads anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Oncologists often recommend that patients on chemotherapy avoid antioxidant supplements including vitamin C.  Now basic research shows that vitamin C reduces the activity of several different chemotherapy drugs, both in cancer cell lines and in experimental mice.

Vitamin C appears to protect the cell against death during chemotherapy by restoring its mitochondria.  Mitochondria power cells, converting nutrients to energy.  When mitochondria are damaged they force the cell to die — the goal of chemotherapy.  By revitalizing damaged mitochondria, the vitamin reduced the effectiveness of all the chemo drugs tested, by as much as 70 percent for some. Read the rest of this entry »