May 21, 2018 -- A simple vitamin cocktail to treat sepsis has shaken up the medical world, raising hopes of a more effective treatment for one of history’s great killers. But will it stand up to tougher tests?

Researchers at several hospitals around the world are trying to reproduce the success reported by a critical-care doctor in Virginia in beating back sepsis, one of the leading causes of hospital deaths.

Paul Marik, MD, chief of pulomonary and criitical care medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School, reported in 2017 that he gave a mix of vitamin C, vitamin B1, and a steroid to nearly four dozen patients who had sepsis in his Norfolk intensive care unit. In the 7 months before he started using the treatment, 19 of 47 sepsis patients died. Of the 47 who got the treatment, all but four survived.

The results got a lot of attention. But it was a small study, comparing before-and-after patient outcomes. Now, researchers are gearing up to test the therapy with large-scale trials using patients selected at random, with some given the cocktail and others given a placebo.

“Dr. Marik feels very strongly that it’s worked in his patients, and he’s changed his practice because of his own experience,” says Jonathan Sevransky, MD, a critical care doctor at Emory University in Atlanta who is leading one of the studies. “If you think something works, it makes sense for a doctor to try something and to change their own practice. But if you want to change other people’s practices, the way to do that is do a randomized, controlled trial -- and ideally, you’d have more than one randomized, controlled trial.”