Open Med (Wars) . No significant benefit of moderate-dose vitamin C on severe COVID-19 cases

[tetano]

Open Med (Wars)


. 2021 Sep 22;16(1):1403-1414.
doi: 10.1515/med-2021-0361. eCollection 2021.
No significant benefit of moderate-dose vitamin C on severe COVID-19 cases


Shaoping Zheng ¹ , Qiaosen Chen ² , Hongbo Jiang ² , Chunxia Guo ³ , Jinzhuo Luo ³ , Sumeng Li ³ , Hua Wang ³ , Huadong Li ⁴ , Xin Zheng ^{3 5} , Zhihong Weng ^{3 5}



Affiliations

• PMID: 34616916
• PMCID: PMC8459914
• DOI: 10.1515/med-2021-0361

Abstract

There is no specific drug for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We aimed to investigate the possible clinical efficacy of moderate-dose vitamin C infusion among inpatients with severe COVID-19. Data of 397 adult patients with severe COVID-19 admitted to a designated clinical center of Wuhan Union Hospital (China) between February 13 and February 29, 2020, were collected. Besides standard therapies, patients were treated with vitamin C (2-4 g/day) or not. The primary outcome was all-cause death. Secondary outcome was clinical improvement of 2 points on a 6-point ordinal scale. About 70 participants were treated with intravenous vitamin C, and 327 did not receive it. No significant association was found between vitamin C use and death on inverse probability treatment weighting (IPTW) analysis (weighted hazard ratio [HR], 2.69; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.91-7.89). Clinical improvement occurred in 74.3% (52/70) of patients in the vitamin C group and 95.1% (311/327) in the no vitamin C group. No significant difference was observed between the two groups on IPTW analysis (weighted HR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.55-1.07). Our findings revealed that in patients with severe COVID-19, treatment with moderate dose of intravenous vitamin C had no significant benefit on reducing the risk of death and obtaining clinical improvement.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-Cov-2; vitamin C.