You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Research report
Association of plasma vitamin C concentration to total and cause-specific mortality: a 16-year prospective study in China
  1. Shao-Ming Wang1,2,
  2. Jin-Hu Fan1,
  3. Philip R Taylor2,
  4. Tram Kim Lam3,
  5. Sanford M Dawsey2,
  6. You-Lin Qiao1,
  7. Christian C Abnet2
  1. 1 Department of Cancer Epidemiology, National Cancer Center/ National Clinical Research Center for Cancer/Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China
  2. 2 Metabolic Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
  3. 3 Environmental Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
  1. Correspondence to You-Lin Qiao, National Cancer Center/ National Clinical Research Center for Cancer/ Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing 100021, China; Qiaoy{at}cicams.ac.cn and Dr Christian C Abnet, Metabolic Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA; abnetc{at}mail.nih.gov

Abstract

Background Vitamin C insufficiency occurs across many countries and has been hypothesised to increase risk of various diseases. Few prospective studies with measured circulating vitamin C have related deficiency to disease mortality, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries.

Methods We randomly selected 948 subjects (473 males and 475 females) aged 53–84 years from a Chinese cohort and measured meta-phosphoric acid-preserved vitamin C concentrations in plasma samples collected in 1999–2000. A total of 551 deaths were accrued from sample collection through 2016, including 141 from cancer, 170 from stroke and 174 from heart diseases. Vitamin C was analysed using season-specific quartiles, as a continuous variable and as a dichotomous variable based on sufficiency status (normal >28 µmol/L vs low ≤28 µmol/L). HRs and 95% CIs were estimated using Cox proportional hazards models.

Results We found significant inverse associations between higher plasma vitamin C concentrations and total mortality in quartile (HRQ4 vs Q10.75, 95% CI 0.59 to 0.95), continuous (HRq20umol/L0.90, 95% CI 0.82 to 0.99) and dichotomous analyses (HRnormal-vs-low0.77, 95% CI 0.63 to 0.95). We observed significant lower risks of heart disease (ptrend-by-quantile=0.03) and cancer deaths (pglobal-across-quantile=0.04) for higher vitamin C, whereas the association was attenuated for stroke in adjusted models. Similar inverse associations were found when comparing normal versus low vitamin C for heart disease (HRnormal-vs-low0.62, 95% CI 0.42 to 0.89).

Conclusion In this long-term prospective Chinese cohort study, higher plasma vitamin C concentration was associated with lower total mortality, heart disease mortality and cancer mortality. Our results corroborate the importance of adequate vitamin C to human health.

  • cancer
  • cardiovascular disease
  • cohort studies
  • heart disease
  • nutrition

https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2018-210809

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors S-MW contributed to study concept and design, data analysis and interpretation, and manuscript writing. J-HF contributed to data acquisition and manuscript preparation. PRT and TKL were involved in the study concept and design, data acquisition and manuscript writing. SMD contributed to data interpretation and manuscript preparation. Y-LQ and CCA were involved in the study concept and design, data acquisition, data interpretation, and manuscript preparation. All authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript for publication.

    • Funding This work was supported by the intramural funding of National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Not required.

    • Ethics approval Institutional Review Board of the Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the US National Cancer Institute.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.