Basic Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Crit Care Med. Feb 4, 2017; 6(1): 37-47
Published online Feb 4, 2017. doi: 10.5492/wjccm.v6.i1.37
Impact of high dose vitamin C on platelet function
Bassem M Mohammed, Kimberly W Sanford, Bernard J Fisher, Erika J Martin, Daniel Contaifer Jr, Urszula Osinska Warncke, Dayanjan S Wijesinghe, Charles E Chalfant, Donald F Brophy, Alpha A Fowler III, Ramesh Natarajan
Bassem M Mohammed, Department of Clinical Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University, Cairo 11562, Egypt
Bassem M Mohammed, Erika J Martin, Daniel Contaifer Jr, Urszula Osinska Warncke, Dayanjan S Wijesinghe, Donald F Brophy, Department of Pharmacotherapy and Outcomes Science, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23298, United States
Kimberly W Sanford, Department of Pathology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23298, United States
Bernard J Fisher, Alpha A Fowler III, Ramesh Natarajan, Division of Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23298, United States
Charles E Chalfant, Research and Development, Hunter Holmes McGuire Veterans Administration Medical Center, the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the VCU Massey Cancer Center, the VCU Institute of Molecular Medicine and the VCU Johnson Center for Critical Care and Pulmonary Research, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23298, United States
Author contributions: Sanford KW and Natarajan R designed the study; Mohammed BM, Fisher BJ, Martin EJ, Contaifer Jr D, Warncke UO, Wijesinghe DS and Natarajan R performed the research and analyzed the data; Mohammed BM, Fisher BJ, Chalfant CE, Brophy DF and Natarajan R wrote the manuscript; all authors drafted the article and made critical revisions related to the intellectual content of the manuscript, and approved the final version of the article.
Supported by Virginia Blood Foundation, No. 11 (To KS and RN); Department of Veterans Affairs (Merit Review Award), No. 5I01BX001792 (To CEC); National Institutes of Health, No. 1U01HD087198 (To CEC); National Institutes of Health, No. 1S10OD010641 (To CEC); National Institutes of Health, No. 5R01HL125353 (To CEC); VCU Massey Cancer Center with funding from National Institutes of Health, No. P30CA016059. The contents of this manuscript do not represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government.
Conflict-of-interest statement: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no conflict of interest exists.
Data sharing statement: Dataset available from the corresponding author (ramesh.natarajan@vcuhealth.org).
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Ramesh Natarajan, PhD, Professor of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University, PO Box 980050, Richmond, VA 23298, United States. ramesh.natarajan@vcuhealth.org
Telephone: +1-804-8271013 Fax: +1-804-6280325
Received: July 26, 2016
Peer-review started: July 29, 2016
First decision: September 2, 2016
Revised: October 15, 2016
Accepted: November 1, 2016
Article in press: November 2, 2016
Published online: February 4, 2017
Core Tip

Core tip: High dose intravenous vitamin C (VitC) is often used by Complementary and Alternate Medicine practitioners for a variety of ailments. Moreover, use of high dose VitC by mainstream physicians as an adjunct in the treatment of sepsis, sepsis induced acute lung injury, cancer and burns is on the rise. However, there is no information on the impact of these high doses VitC on normal platelet (PLT) function. Prolonged exposure of ex vivo PLTs to high doses of VitC altered some PLT functions as assessed by thromboelastography. However, short term exposure (< 8 d) or low dose exposure had almost no impact on PLT function.