Research on Health Care 2022

Running head: HEALTH CARE
Health care
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1HEALTH CARE
Background:
Cancer is a life threatening disease and it is the major reason behind mortality worldwide.
Accordingly to WHO (2018) on cancer burden, 9.6 million death have occurred because of
cancer in 2018 and 18.1 million new cases emerged in the same year. The increasing burden of
the disease resulted for several factors such as population growth, ageing and impact of social
and economic development. Common treatment options for patients diagnosed with cancers
include surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy (Norwood Toro et al., 2019). However, some of
the drawbacks associated with this therapy are that it is associated with serious side-effects, high
cost and complications for patients. Chemotherapy induced in nausea and side-effects like hair
loss result in great physical, emotional and psychological trauma for patients (Chagani et al.,
2017). Thus, the available treatment options are stressful and costly that adversely affects the
quality of life of the patients suffering from cancer. Due to these issues in conventional treatment
for cancers, new researchers are looking for natural products to cure the disease. Recent research
developments have revealed the potential of Vitamin C in preventing cancer (Zhao et al., 2018).
The review of research literature is important to get better understanding how effective Vitamin
C is in preventing cancer.
Literature review:
From the review of recent research literature, various contrasting results have been
obtained regarding the effectiveness of Vitamin C in prevention of cancer and treatment. A meta-
analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) by Lee, Oh and Myung (2015) investigated
about the effectiveness of the Vitamin C supplements for preventing cancer. As per the meta-
analysis of the 7 RCT papers, it has been revealed that no major relationship between Vitamin C

2HEALTH CARE
supplementation as well as cancer is there. No effectiveness of Vitamin C supplement has been
found in sub-group treatment analyses and no difference in outcome was achieved based on
methodological quality and cancer mortality rates. The finding was consistent with other meta-
analyses done in the past. However, some of the limitations that limited making direct conclusion
about the research question were that all participants in the study were between the age group of
50 to 60 years. Hence, the findings are not possible to be generalized for younger population.
Hence, review of robust clinical trial and further trials is needed to explore the relationship
between Vitamin C and cancer.
Most recently, van Gorkom et al. (2019) have conducted a systematic review to evaluate
the impact of Vitamin C associated with cancer treatment. Total 19 clinical trials were included
in the review and the main outcome from the review was that Vitamin C supplementation cannot
yield any positive results for cancer patients. This study also proved that there is no positive
result associated with Vitamin C supplementation and no improvement in overall survival,
quality of life, clinical status and the status of the performance was found. The researchers
reviewed papers with small and large sample size and papers which used different doses of
Vitamin C in different intervention. The drawback in all the study was that the recruitment
process was not clearly defined. Ten studies measure overall survival rate and seven studies
found positive effect of Vitamin C. In case of measurement of clinical response, only six studies
were found which gave clear response related to cancer. Objective improvement was seen only
in health care service users suffering from with leukemia. Overall, the study failed to make any
conclusion about the impact of treatment with Vitamin C in cancer patients due to variations in
study population, co-intervention and Vitamin C treatment. This gap suggested the need for