Vitamin C Rich Diet May Cut Arthritis Risk

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Vitamin C Rich Diet May Cut Arthritis Risk

 

Sat Jun 12,10:07 AM ET

 

By Anthony J. Brown, MD

 

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Consumption of foods high in vitamin C appears

to protect against inflammatory polyarthritis, a form of rheumatoid

arthritis involving two or more joints, new research suggests.

 

The findings, which appear in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, stem

from a study of more than 20,000 subjects who kept diet diaries and were

arthritis-free when the study began. The analysis focused on 73 subjects

who developed inflammatory polyarthritis during follow-up between 1993 and

2001, and 146 similar subjects who remained arthritis-free.

 

Dr. Dorothy J. Pattison, from the University of Manchester in the UK, and

colleagues found that low intake of fruits, vegetables, and vitamin C

raised the risk of inflammatory polyarthritis. For example, subjects who

consumed the lowest amounts of vitamin C were three times more likely to

develop the condition than their peers who consumed the highest amounts.

 

 

Although lower intake of fruits and vegetables seemed to increase the

arthritis risk, the trends were not statistically significant, the

researchers point out. Similarly, low intake of vitamin E and beta-carotene

was only weakly linked with an increased risk of inflammatory polyarthritis.

 

 

The findings contrast with a recent report linking high doses of vitamin C

with worsening disease in guinea pigs with osteoarthritis, the more common

type of arthritis that occurs with aging.

 

 

In an interview with Reuters Health, Pattison said that these opposite

findings may reflect the fact that rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis

are caused by different physiologic problems. With rheumatoid arthritis, an

autoimmune disease, the body attacks itself, she explained. In contrast,

osteoarthritis involves a degenerative process that worsens over time.

 

 

Pattison added that her group has a study being reviewed for publication

that looks at the effect of meat consumption on the risk of arthritis.

 

 

SOURCE: Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, July 2004.