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Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

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Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#31

Post by triangleman »

arbitrage wrote: post #26
sbierwagen wrote: post #2

On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.

If you live long enough, you have a really good chance of getting some type of cancer.

Really because I heard that once you get past a certain age, let's say 65, your chance of getting cancer goes way down.

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#32

Post by nonbel »

nonbel wrote: post #27
api wrote: post #7

Lots of mice studies don't translate well into humans. This one is highly specific -- a specific mutation. It's unlikely to have much bearing on real world cancer.

>[Supp Methods:] "To test the effect of vitamin C, two million HCT116 or VACO432 cells were injected subcutaneously into the flank of 6 to 8-week-old female athymic nude mice (Harlan, Indianapolis, IN). After 7-10 days, mice with tumors of 40-60 mm3 were randomly divided into two groups. One group was treated with freshly prepared vitamin C (sodium ascorbate in 400 ul PBS, 4 g per kilogram of body weight) by intraper…

>"Vitamin C treatment significantly reduced tumor growth compared to vehicle control treatment (Fig. 2B)."

This is a perfect example of what is wrong with biomed research. Just because the null hypothesis of no difference is rejected does not mean it is for your favorite reason. There are other reasons for this difference. For example, as mentioned above, perhaps the initial tumor size was different (which we cannot see since the size of the points in figure 2 correspond to ~50 mm^3 on the y axis).

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#33

Post by prodmerc »

sbierwagen wrote: post #2

On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.

But he was in his 90's. Really, the only way to test if it worked is to make him relive his life without vitamin C :-)

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#34

Post by prodmerc »

Retric wrote: post #30
pluckytree wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the mocking, either, especially since he’s been proven extremely right about the ill-effects of consuming processed sugars. I suspect it’s rooted in his anti-nuclear and anti-war views and it just grew from there. His views on Vitamin C were just a convenient target. It’s uncomfortable to those with analytical minds to accept the fact that we know so little about the human body and how it works. St…

Nutrition has changed far less over the last 50 years than you might think. The real issue is condensing it into sound bytes. In a sound bite X More! vs. X Less! has a lot to do with peoples eating habits and overall health not just how good or bad X is. Especially when it often breaks down as Benefits A, B, C vs. problems X, Y, Z. Yes, sometimes we add a benefit or risk to the list and or change the risk weights sli…

I'm not very knowledgeable in this topic, but I think it's changed a lot. The way food is processed changes the way we're absorbing it.

Today's bread, milk, cheese, veggies, fruits are a bit different than 50 years ago - they last longer, taste different, probably because of how they're processed.

That lack of bacteria that makes things go bad faster should have a different effect on our bodies, no?

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#35

Post by vecter »

triangleman wrote: post #31
arbitrage wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live long enough, you have a really good chance of getting some type of cancer.

Really because I heard that once you get past a certain age, let's say 65, your chance of getting cancer goes way down.

When you hear something about a field you know very little about, your default reaction should be skepticism. People say bullshit stuff all the time and pass it off as fact.

I don't know much about cancer biology, but what you heard sounds wrong. I don't see why, as you live longer, your body gets better at fighting cancer. If anything, the opposite sounds more likely.

One possibility is that someone is citing data with survivorship bias. That is, the people who make it past 65 have good genes that generally lower their chances of getting cancer. Even if this were the case, obviously it doesn't imply a causal relationship where passing 65 years reduces your chance of getting cancer.

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#36

Post by matznerd »

triangleman wrote: post #31
arbitrage wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live long enough, you have a really good chance of getting some type of cancer.

Really because I heard that once you get past a certain age, let's say 65, your chance of getting cancer goes way down.

It's not that the cancer chance goes down significantly, it's that the highest risk for death after 65-75 is cardiovascular related.

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#37

Post by nonbel »

vecter wrote: post #35
triangleman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really because I heard that once you get past a certain age, let's say 65, your chance of getting cancer goes way down.

When you hear something about a field you know very little about, your default reaction should be skepticism. People say bullshit stuff all the time and pass it off as fact. I don't know much about cancer biology, but what you heard sounds wrong. I don't see why, as you live longer, your body gets better at fighting cancer. If anything, the opposite sounds more likely. One possibility is that someone is citing data w…

Flip 5 coins and stop when each turns up tails, record the number of trials until the last coin is tails (just use # trials for the last coin...). Repeat this 100 times. Does the probability of ending on a given trial keep increasing with trial#? No, it will peak depending on the number of coins and probability of tails for each coin (here always close to 0.5).

This is the same as accumulating n number of modifications in a cell until it grows into and gets detected as a tumor. Instead of accumulating "tails" you are accumulating mutations or whatever it turns out to be.

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#38

Post by cjhveal »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #29

While it is easy to criticize any animal model study, especially when targeting cancer, we should be HIGHLY skeptical of any mouse study that uses vitamin C. Why? Mice synthesize their own vitamin C; humans do not (hence, it should properly be called ascorbic acid in mice, not vitamin c). The biological pathways involving this compound are very different between species, and deserve special consideration.

The dose makes the poison (or the cure). According to the article they gave daily injections containing 300 oranges worth of vitamin C (which google tells me is over 15 grams of vitamin C, an order of magnitude larger than the daily recommended dose for adult humans).

Certainly being skeptical is still warranted, as OP is correct, there are significant differences in how this particular compound is handled species to species. However, simply that mice produce ascorbic acid does not imply that they produce it in quantity great enough to impact this kind of tumor.

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#39

Post by nonbel »

nonbel wrote: post #37
vecter wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you hear something about a field you know very little about, your default reaction should be skepticism. People say bullshit stuff all the time and pass it off as fact. I don't know much about cancer biology, but what you heard sounds wrong. I don't see why, as you live longer, your body gets better at fighting cancer. If anything, the opposite sounds more likely. One possibility is that someone is citing data w…

Flip 5 coins and stop when each turns up tails, record the number of trials until the last coin is tails (just use # trials for the last coin...). Repeat this 100 times. Does the probability of ending on a given trial keep increasing with trial#? No, it will peak depending on the number of coins and probability of tails for each coin (here always close to 0.5). This is the same as accumulating n number of modificatio…

Not sure why this was downvoted... It is easy to prove to yourself. Here is some R:

#p=Prob(tails), n=# Coins, q=Prob(heads), Npop=# times to repeat

p=.5; n=5; q=1-p; Npop=1000

#Flip one Coin 100x and find first tails (probability of getting one mutation)

OneCoin=function() which(sample(0:1,100, prob=c(q,p), replace=T)==1)[1]

#Flip n coins and find last one to turn up tails (probability of accumulating n mutations)

OneSet=function() max(replicate(n,OneCoin()))

#Repeat Npop times, like different people in a population

res=replicate(Npop,OneSet())

hist(res, breaks=Npop/20)

Re: Vitamin C kills tumor cells with hard-to-treat mutation in mice

#40

Post by coldtea »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #13
sbierwagen wrote: post #2

On a side note, Linus Pauling was notorious for, late in life, after winning all his Nobels and other such prizes, pushing the idea that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure all cancers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research... https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/high-dose-vitamin-c-and... He died in 1994, of cancer.

>He died in 1994, of cancer. Why is this brought out in such a dismissing and ironic way? He claimed that there may be some treatments with Vitamin C, not that if you take a little a day you'll be immortal. Hell, there are so many different types of cancer, that even if megadosing C helped with one it probably wouldn't help with all. He lived to his 90s. At that point it was either cancer or heart disease that kills…

>He claimed that there may be some treatments with Vitamin C, not that if you take a little a day you'll be immortal.

Well, he was a little too enthusiastic and quite close to claiming that.

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