Vitamin C By Linus Pauling

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Introduction:
In today’s culture, being tan coincides with what is believed to be beautiful. As a result, it is no surprise that in the United States of America, an estimated 922,000 people are currently living with some level of melanoma. Even though the news media and doctors warn people about the risks of too much sun exposure and give information as to how to prevent contracting skin cancer, people are still disregarding this important information and going into the sun for extended periods of time unprotected.
The widely known Linus Pauling may have been the first individual to propose the importance of vitamin C as a means of improved health, and a preventive measure of such illnesses as cancer. However, the proposal of high dosed Vitamin C was not received in a positive manner, as it is often considered one of the most controversial proposals in 20th century science. Despite the evidence proposed by Pauling, many scientists of the time deemed this idea as too “simplistic”; the proposal of high dosed vitamin c continued to be ignored for most of the 20th century. It wouldn’t be until Pauling’s death that this subject was viewed in more scrutiny. Many of the findings in the 21st century confirmed Linus Pauling’s proposal of almost 70 years ago. Not only has high dosed vitamin c been shown to be very effective preventive measure, it has also been shown to have anti-cancer properties. These findings have intrigued us to take a more in depth look at the correlation between melanoma and high dosed vitamin c.
Melanoma is a very metastatic form of cancer that can go from stage 1 at diagnosis to an almost untreatable stage 4 in as little as a month. Furthermore, chemotherap...

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...rious cytostatic drugs(40). It is important to note that specific dosage of vitamin C is crucial when combining it with cytostatic drugs; while Heaney used concentrations of 0-750 uM, Anja Fromberg applied 1-2 mM of vitamin C. Thus, proper dosage is seen to effect results in a positive manner, while improper dosage can have detrimental cytotoxic affects (6).
Christian M. Kurbacher helps supprort this claim with MCF-7 breast cells. When vitamin C was added to cytostatic drugs cisplatin, doxorubicin and paclititaxel, results indicated that chemotherapeutic drugs are more effective (41). Additionally, as high doses of vitamin are not toxic, this allows for a large range of potential chemotherapeutic drugs. While, sensitivity and cytostatic drugs are yet to be tested on melanoma cell lines, the future looks bright for prospective cytostatic+ vitamin C combinations.

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