The common cold is a major cause of visits to a doctor in high-income countries and of absenteeism from work and school. There are over 200 viruses which can cause the common cold symptoms including runny nose, congestion, sneezing, sore throat, cough, and sometimes headache, fever and red eyes. Symptoms vary from person to person and cold to cold. Since the common cold is usually caused by one of the respiratory viruses, antibiotics are useless and therefore other potential treatment options are of substantial public health interest.

Vitamin C has been proposed for treating respiratory infections since it was isolated in the 1930s. It became particularly popular in the 1970s when Nobel laureate Linus Pauling concluded from earlier placebo -controlled trials that vitamin C would prevent and alleviate the common cold. Over two dozen new trials were undertaken thereafter. Vitamin C has been widely sold and used as a preventive and therapeutic agent.

This review is restricted to placebo -controlled trials testing 0.2 g/day or more of vitamin C. Regular ingestion of vitamin C had no effect on common cold incidence in the ordinary population , based on 29 trial comparisons involving 11,306 participants. However, regular supplementation had a modest but consistent effect in reducing the duration of common cold symptoms, which is based on 31 study comparisons with 9745 common cold episodes. In five trials with 598 participants exposed to short periods of extreme physical stress (including marathon runners and skiers) vitamin C halved the common cold risk . The published trials have not reported adverse effects of vitamin C.