Pre-eclampsia Risk

[ascorbicjoe]

What are your thoughts on this article? Pre-eclampsia is worse with vitamins C and E. I could not find a reference to dosages, but I am sure it would likely not be greater than 500mg of C and 400IU of E. Have anyone seen the study and not the article. My interest is how reporting is often, quite different from what the study indicates.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4859984.stm

[CPlus]

If you look through the Foundation website I am sure there are studies showing that vitamin C helps pre-eclampsia. This looks like another badly-designed trial to me. The final comment caught my eye:

"However, a good thing that has come out of the trial is that it will prevent the use of high dose vitamin C and E slipping into clinical practice.

Incredible. You can see there will be a long way to go before vitamin C is used more widely with comments like that.

Jonathan

[ofonorow]

The headline - which most people will read - does not match the findings. The study found that vitamin C and vitamin E did not provide much, if any benefit to high risk women. The measurements were highly subjective and differed by 1 or 2 % between the groups.

On one hand, the finding is dissapointing because 1000 mg of vitamin C and 1000 iu (if other reports can be believed) did not seem to improve this condition . But to extrapolate such a result into "increases pregnancy risk" in "all pregnant women" is poor science, to say the least. These headlines apparently had help from a pharmacetuical company marketing department or a naive researcher.

My wife consumed 9000 mg of vitamin C - before my son was conceived, through pregnancy and lactation. The pregnancy was "easy" and the baby extremely healthy. My son, now in high school, has missed one day of school in his entire life. He has never felt ill, but we think he did have the chicken pox for a day. If the population learned to use vitamins C, A and E, the medical profession would hardly have anything left to do.