Vitamin C lowers levels of inflammation biomarker considered predictor of hea...(mmon sense suggests and our study confir...)

The researchers said that for people with elevated CRP levels, the amount of CRP reduction achieved by taking vitamin C supplements in this study is comparable to that in many other studies of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins. They noted that several larger statin trials lowered CRP levels by about 0.2 milligrams per liter; in this latest study, vitamin C lowered CRP by 0.25 milligrams per liter.

"This finding of an effect of vitamin C is important because it shows in a carefully conducted randomized, controlled trial that for people with moderately elevated levels of inflammation, vitamin C may be able to reduce CRP as much as statins have done in other studies," said Block.

Evidence of the link between elevated CRP levels and a greater risk of heart disease has grown in recent years, but it had been unclear whether the beneficial effects of lowering CRP were independent of the effects of lowering cholesterol.

Newly released results from a multinational clinical trial help answer that question. Led by researchers at Harvard Medical School, the study, known as the Jupiter trial, found that statins reduced cardiovascular mortality and morbidity among people whose cholesterol levels were normal, but whose levels of CRP were greater than 2 milligrams per liter. The Jupiter trial found that among people who had such high levels of CRP at baseline, levels of CRP were 37 percent lower with statins compared with a placebo.

"One of the strengths of the Jupiter trial is that only persons with CRP levels greater than 2 milligrams per liter were enrolled," Block added. "Researchers found very important effects of lowering CRP in people who had high levels to begin with."

In the UC Berkeley study on vitamin C, participants who started out with CRP levels greater than 2 milligrams per liter had 34
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