In Brief: Vitamin C and cataracts
This article was originally published in The Tan Sheet
Executive Summary
Vitamin C and cataracts: Use of vitamin C supplements for 10 or more years is associated with a 77% lower prevalence of "early lens opacities" in women 56-71 (odds ratio: 0.23, 95% C.I.) and an 83% lower prevalence of "moderate lens opacities" (odds ratio 0.17, 95% C.I.) compared with subjects who did not use vitamin C supplements, say Paul Jacques et al., Tufts University, in the October issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The researchers studied a 247-female cohort selected from participants in the Nurses' Health Study, with overrepresentation of women with high or low vitamin C intakes. "These data corroborate the prior observation that long-term use of vitamin C supplements was associated with a 45% lower rate of lens extraction in the larger cohort from which our sample was derived," the researchers noted. Previous epidemiological studies also have suggested a protective role of vitamin C in cataract development...