Researchers Find Large Doses May Lessen Symptoms : Vitamin C Gains New Ammunition in Battle Against Common Cold

Rekindling an old debate, researchers at the University of Wisconsin have concluded that large doses of Vitamin C may reduce the severity of the common cold.

Elliot Dick, a professor of preventive medicine, presented his team’s findings this week at an international symposium on medical virology in Anaheim.

Medical researchers have been debating the efficacy of Vitamin C as a cold remedy since at least 1970, when Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling declared that megadoses of the vitamin would prevent colds or lessen their symptoms.

At 86, Pauling is still one of the vitamin’s strongest advocates, consuming 18 grams a day and boosting that to 60 grams a day “when he feels a cold coming on,” his secretary, Dorothy Munroe, said. (According to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the recommended dosage for Vitamin C is only 60 milligrams a day. There are 1,000 milligrams in a gram.)

Over the years, however, researchers from Toronto, Pittsburgh and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., have disputed Pauling’s claims for the vitamin and described its effect on colds as “clinically insignificant.”

In an interview this week, Dick said he still needs to conduct several more field trials before he will convince the skeptics. Still, he said, his experiment last spring showed that “Vitamin C sharply reduced the signs and symptoms of a cold,” and also reduced the likelihood that the cold would be transmitted to someone else.

Procedure Described

Early in April, Dick and three researchers began giving eight student volunteers two grams of Vitamin C a day, administered in four doses of 500 milligrams each. At the same time, the researchers gave placebos to a control group of eight students.

After 3 1/2 weeks of the megadoses, Dick moved his 16 volunteers into a dorm with eight sneezing, wheezing men who had been infected in his lab with a cold virus. As Dick and his researchers watched and counted sneezes, the volunteers spent the next week in close contact with the cold sufferers--playing poker and watching TV with them, eating all meals together and sleeping in adjacent bunks.

Dick’s findings: Six of the eight students in the placebo group got colds as did six of the eight students who took Vitamin C. But students in the Vitamin C group were sick for an average of only seven days whereas students who received the placebo were sick longer--for an average of 12.3 days.

Milder Symptoms

In addition, Dick said, students in the Vitamin C group had significantly milder symptoms than the placebo group. In the seven-day period that cold sufferers and volunteers lived together, Dick’s researchers counted 1,053 coughs, 49 sneezes and 127 nose blows in the placebo group contrasted with only 334 coughs, 29 sneezes and 97 nose blows from the Vitamin C group.

Dick, who has studied colds since 1957 and heads the Respiratory Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, said he will need additional experiments to learn whether Vitamin C must be taken daily to lessen the effect of a cold, or whether it could be effective if taken only at the onset of cold symptoms.

But until he reproduces the experiment, Dick admitted, “a lot of people will be trying to shoot us down.”