The breath vitamin

The incidence of asthma around the developed world continues to grow. In Australia it is estimated that 10 per cent of people have the condition. In the US around eight per cent have this problem which involves difficulty doing the most fundamental thing of life; drawing breath. In addition, new understanding is showing that even people without asthma can have problems breathing when they exercise that are not related to asthma. The good news for those people, who have a condition called exercise-induced bronchoconstriction, is that a simple thing like vitamin C can help.

”Exercise-induced bronchoconstriction” means a temporary narrowing of the airways that occurs during or after exercise. This condition was previously called exercise-induced asthma however, while it can occur in people who have asthma but you don’t have to have asthma to experience it. The statistics say that exercise-induced asthma occurs in around 50-65 per cent of people with asthma even if they are being treated with inhaled corticosteroids. Increasingly though, exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB) is being recognised in school children and in elite athletes who have normal lung function. Estimates are that around 10 per cent of the general population suffer from EIB but among some fields of competitive winter sport the incidence can be up around 50 per cent.

Since the condition has nothing to do with physical fitness but is related to the nature of the airways themselves, there are a lot of frustrated people out there who want to exercise but are restricted by their airways. For those people there is some good news on the horizon.

In a recent study, it was shown that vitamin C supplementation reduces the incidence of the common cold in people who undertake heavy physical exercise. It is not a huge stretch of the imagination to think that it might also help people with EIB. To see if there is a link, researchers examined a series of studies done on the impact of vitamin C on a parameter called FEV1.

FEV1 is is forced expiratory volume in one second, the amount of air you can exhale in a second. In people with EIB there is a 10 per cent greater drop in exercise induced FEV1 than among other among people. In the three trials examined it was found that supplementing with vitamin C at a dose of between 0.5g and 2g one to one and a half hours before exercise cut the decline in FEV1 caused by exercise by around 48 per cent.

Given the safety and easy availability of vitamin C supplements this is certainly worth a try for any people wanting to exercise but finding themselves hampered for breath by EIB. Vitamin C may not necessarily make those folk breathe easy but the news that it could help is a breath of fresh air.