Effect of high-dose intravenous vitamin C on prognosis in patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia

Suna et al., Med. Clin. (Barc.), doi:10.1016/j.medcli.2021.04.010

May 2021

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Retrospective 323 hospitalized patients, 153 treated with vitamin C, showing no significant differences. Patients in each group were in different time periods, with the vitamin C group first. Time based confounding is possible due to improvements in SOC.

Although the 21% lower mortality is not statistically significant, it is consistent with the significant 20% lower mortality [10‑29%] from meta analysis of the 38 mortality results to date.

This is the 25th of 63 COVID-19 controlled studies for vitamin C, which collectively show efficacy with p=0.00000026. 16 studies are RCTs, which show efficacy with p=0.00000018. This study is excluded in the after exclusion results of meta analysis: substantial confounding by time likely due to declining usage over the early stages of the pandemic when overall treatment protocols improved dramatically.

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risk of death, 21.3% lower, RR 0.79, p = 0.52, treatment 17 of 153 (11.1%), control 24 of 170 (14.1%), NNT 33.

risk of ICU admission, 1.9% higher, RR 1.02, p = 1.00, treatment 11 of 153 (7.2%), control 12 of 170 (7.1%).

Effect extraction follows pre-specified rules prioritizing more serious outcomes. Submit updates

Suna et al., 11 May 2021, retrospective, Turkey, peer-reviewed, 5 authors.

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Effect of high-dose intravenous vitamin C on prognosis in patients with SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia

Uzel S ¸ ener Kavurgacı Suna, Uzel Şener Melahat, Yıldız Murat, Öztürk Ergür Figen, Öztürk Ayperi

Medicina Clínica, doi:10.1016/j.medcli.2021.04.010

Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre -including this research content -immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Late treatment
is less effective

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