Topical Vitamin C in the Prevention and Treatment of Actinic Keratoses and Nonmelanoma Skin Cancers: A Systematic Scoping Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Vitamin C is an antioxidant that is involved in collagen synthesis, maintenance of the skin barrier, and neutralization of free oxygen radicals in the skin. The potential for use of topical vitamin C as a therapeutic and protective agent against actinic keratoses (AKs) and skin cancers has not been fully delineated. OBJECTIVE: To review the current evidence on topical vitamin C in the prevention and treatment of AKs and skin cancers. METHODS: A systematic search of the PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, and Cochrane Clinical Trials was completed, and a scoping review was conducted. RESULTS: Four studies met inclusion criteria. Forty patients with AKs, 21 patients with basal cell carcinomas (BCCs), and 1 patient with a well-differentiated squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) underwent treatment with topical vitamin C. Two randomized controlled trials (RCTs), 1 prospective observational study, and 1 case report were included in this review. CONCLUSION: This scoping review found that highly concentrated topical formulations of vitamin C may have some benefit in the treatment of AKs and low-risk subtypes of nonmelanoma skin cancers. However, only a small number of clinical studies have been conducted on this topic, limiting the ability to generate clinical recommendations on this therapy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".