COVID worse if lower Vitamin C, but not Vitamin D in this study – Aug 2022

Vitamin C Deficiency in Blood Samples of COVID-19 Patients

Antioxidants 2022, 11(8), 1580; https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox11081580

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the most notable pandemic of the modern era. A relationship between ascorbate (vitamin C) and COVID-19 severity is well known, whereas the role of other vitamins is less understood. The present study compared the blood levels of four vitamins in a cohort of COVID-19 patients with different severities and uninfected individuals. Serum concentrations of ascorbate, calcidiol, retinol, and α-tocopherol were measured in a cohort of 74 COVID-19 patients and 8 uninfected volunteers. The blood levels were statistically compared and additional co-morbidity factors were considered.
COVID-19 patients had significantly lower plasma ascorbate levels than the controls (p-value < 0.001), and further stratification revealed that the controls had higher levels than fatal, critical, and severe COVID-19 cases (p-values < 0.001).
However, no such trend was observed for calcidiol, retinol, or α-tocopherol (p-value ≥ 0.093). Survival analysis showed that plasma ascorbate below 11.4 µM was associated with a lengthy hospitalization and a high risk of death. The results indicated that COVID-19 cases had depleted blood ascorbate associated with poor medical conditions, confirming the role of this vitamin in the outcome of COVID-19 infection.
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Clipped from PDF

• ..."according to a recent study, vitamin C levels were undetectable in more than 90% of COVID-19 patients with ARDS [43] "
• "It is estimated that up to 45% of the population in the United States is vitamin C deficient [50] "
• "Several studies have reported how administration of vitamin C reduced the ARDS’ severity and fatality rate in COVID-19 [14,26,51]
• Our study includes some limitations. Firstly, there was a high proportion of patients (79.7%) with undetectable plasma ascorbate, which might suggest an artifact due to degradation of this vitamin."
  • Question: if they had "undetectable plasma ascorbate", how did they measure it?

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VitaminDWiki - 25 studies in both categories Vitamin C and Virus

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Observation by a reader on Vitamin C and humans

Humans are one of only four mammals that fails to produce vitamin C as a stress hormone. All of the other mammals produce vitamin C in the non-stressed state of at least 2,000 mg per day. Many mammals, like the goats and cattle, produce over 10,000 mg per day unstressed, and just like two other stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline), vitamin C is stored and released from the adrenal glands. When stressed these C-producing mammals double or triple their baseline amounts. As C is made from blood sugar (glucose), it is routinely available for production in the liver. Both cortisol and adrenaline require vitamin C for their production. This makes humans particularly vulnerable to sudden oxidative stresses, like serious viral infections.