Can Vitamin C Prevent and Treat Common Cold?
Written on November 30, 2024 - 1:44 pm | by Terra
Should you take vitamin C to prevent and treat colds? Let’see what does this 2010 review add to the topic.
Why look at vitamin C?
- Common cold is the major cause of visits to the doc in western countries and absentism from work and school
- Worse yet, you to miss your workouts too!
- Anitbiotics are ineffective since common colds are caused by viruses
- Vitamin c has been widely sold to treat and prevent common cold
What were the study highlights?
The study is a systematic review. Out of 55 studies, 36 met the inclusion criteria.
- High quality methodology : Studies were accessed for blinding, random allocation , placebo indistinguishabilty, allocation concealment, studiy search done by independent authors and sought intrepretation only when data is questionable.
- Treatment: Orally administered vitamin C of at least 0.2 g daily for a single day or for a period.
- Outcome: Outcome measures were incidence, duration or severity of the common cold.
What were the vitamin C study results
- Prevention (incidence of colds): There is very little benefit of taking vitamin C routinely to prevent colds. In special circumstances, If you physically very active and /or exposed to cold conditions (marathon running, skiers), vitamin C could beneficial to prevent colds. This was consistently shown even with smaller doses.
- Treatments after the onset (therapeutic): No trials have shown it to be effective. But since vitamin C has consistently shown to decrease the severity and duration, it might be worth a try. We need more studies to see if high doses ( 8g/day) can have a therapeutic effect and if supplementation is more effective in children than adults.
- Dosage: The effective dosage can be from 1 gms to 8 gms.
Practical recommendations
- If you live in cold countries and is highly active or prone to colds (athelete or heavy lifting, dieting), supplementing vitamin C during the winter could be beneficial. The dosage could be from 1- 4 gms.
- There is little practical benefit of taking it year round.
- If you already got a cold, try some high doses as soon as you can (4g - 8g). If it doesn’t work, have some chicken soup instead
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Tags: Cold, Common Cold, Vitamin C