Japan Study: Scurvy in Children Is Mostly Linked to Very Selective Eating, and Often Misdiagnosed

Scurvy, the disease of severe vitamin C deficiency, is usually thought of as a sailors' illness from centuries past. A nationwide study from Japan, published online in September 2026 in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, shows it still turns up in children today, and that doctors can miss it.

Paediatricians led by Aichi Medical University surveyed 407 training hospitals certified by the Japan Pediatric Society to find those that had treated scurvy between 2014 and 2023, then sent detailed questionnaires to those hospitals and to others found through published case reports. They analysed 47 children from 35 hospitals.

The children were young, with a median age of about three and a half, and 70% were boys. Most did not look malnourished: only about a third had a body-mass score in the clearly underweight range, and only one in five had lost weight. What they shared was the diet. Ninety-six percent ate a highly selective diet, and 72% had autism spectrum disorder, a condition in which strong food aversions are common. About one in eight had no underlying condition at all.

The most common first sign was trouble walking, seen in 88% of the children, which reflects the bone and joint pain scurvy can cause. Thirty percent were initially misdiagnosed, and 38% went through tests the authors describe as potentially harmful before the cause was found. In 77%, vitamin C in the blood before treatment was too low to measure. The authors conclude that careful questions about diet are needed so the diagnosis is not delayed.

Why mention this on a skincare site? Vitamin C serums are applied to the face and are not a way to get the vitamin C the body needs; that comes from food such as fruit and vegetables, or from a supplement a doctor recommends. A child who eats only a handful of foods and starts limping or refusing to walk should be seen by a paediatrician, and it is worth telling them what the child actually eats. The study is a survey of hospital records, so it shows patterns among diagnosed cases rather than how common scurvy is in all children.