Vitamin C from food tied to lower cataract risk
Baku, July 16 (AZERTAC). Older adults who get very little vitamin C in their diets may have an increased risk of developing cataracts, a study in India finds.
Cataracts are a clouding of the eye`s lens that commonly cause vision problems in older people. Some studies, but not all, have found that people with higher intakes of antioxidants, including vitamin C, may have a lower risk of developing the condition.
But those studies have been done in Western countries -- and not in lower-income countries like India, where people`s vitamin C levels tend to be very low and rates of cataract are particularly high.
For the new study, researchers evaluated more than 5,600 Indian adults age 60 and up for cataracts. They also interviewed them about their diets and lifestyle habits, and measured their blood levels of vitamin C.
Overall, nearly 73 percent of the study participants were found to have cataracts. But that risk dipped as vitamin C blood levels and vitamin C intake rose.
In the roughly one-quarter of older adults with the highest vitamin C levels, the risk of cataract was 39 percent lower than in people with the lowest levels of the nutrient. That was with factors like income, smoking habits, high blood pressure and diabetes taken into account.
The findings, reported in the journal Ophthalmology, do not prove that adequate vitamin C protects against cataracts.
In Western countries, studies have come to conflicting conclusions as to whether people with high vitamin C intakes have a lower cataract risk.
Another possibility, according to Fletcher, is that taking a few nutrients in pill form simply does not mimic the effects of a good diet.
Foods high in vitamin C include citrus fruits like oranges and grapefruit, green and red peppers, kiwifruit, strawberries, broccoli and tomatoes. In the U.S., the official recommendation is for men to get 90 milligrams of vitamin C per day, while women should get 75 milligrams.
In this study, most older Indian adults were getting well below that.
If extra vitamin C was shown to lower cataract risk in India, the benefits could be substantial.
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