Vitamin C may help diabetics
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services -- Unrestricted

06-05-09

A University of Oklahoma researcher might have found a link between taking vitamin C with insulin and stopping blood vessel damage caused by type 1 diabetes.

"We know that when the glucose is under control, the organs that have been damaged by high glucose take 10 to 12 years to get back," said principal researcher Dr. Michael Ihnat, a pharmacologist at the OU College of Medicine Department of Cell Biology. "We wanted to have the ability to test what might be causing this."

The study's findings will appear this week in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Ihnat's team reconfirmed data that pointed to free radicals as the cause of the damage.

Free radicals are any atom or molecule with a single unpaired electron in the outer shell. They move through the body stealing an electron from other atoms or molecules, which starts a chain reaction.

Diabetes complications include damaged proteins and blood vessels, a result of free radicals' rampage through the body, he said.

Ihnat, along with Dr. Antonio Ceriello of the University of Warwick in England, collaborated on a theory that antioxidants would stop or reduce the damage, preventing some painful and fatal consequences of diabetes.

Those include heart disease, poor circulation, amputation, kidney disease and diabetic retinopathy.

In a carefully controlled study, researchers put patients who previously had difficulty controlling their glucose levels on intravenous insulin and vitamin C,

he said.

"Vitamin C was able to get patients normalized for complication markers," Ihnat said. "Vitamin C is an antioxidant that can get the levels of free radicals under control."

He suggested that people with type 1 diabetes take a multivitamin supplement or a couple of vitamin C tablets each day to prevent damage to their blood vessels and organs.

"To be brutally honest, it can't hurt them, but we think their doctors should be informed," Ihnat said.

Diabetics also should eat foods that are high in antioxidants, such as berries, carrots, broccoli, nuts and leafy greens, he said.

The results may not be as dramatic as researchers found in the study because vitamin C was supplied for a full day intravenously.

But Ihnat said he is working to engineer a better way pharmaceutically to get antioxidant molecules into the bloodstream.

"We don't have a cure obviously in hand," he said, "but we have an idea of how to minimize damage."