VICTORY Trial: High-Dose IV Vitamin C Did Not Help Severe Burn Patients and May Have Caused Harm

For years some burn units have given very large intravenous doses of vitamin C in the first days after a major burn, on the theory that it could calm the body-wide inflammation that follows and protect the kidneys, lungs and circulation. A randomised trial published in JAMA in September 2026 tested that idea properly and found no benefit, with signs of harm.

The VICTORY trial, led by researchers at University Hospital Würzburg in Germany with collaborators across North, Central and South America, Europe and Asia, enrolled adults at 24 burn centres between August 2020 and September 2025. Everyone had deep burns covering at least a fifth of their body surface and needed skin grafts. Half were randomly assigned to intravenous vitamin C at 50 mg per kilogram of body weight every six hours for four days; the other half received an identical-looking placebo. Neither patients nor clinicians knew which.

The trial was meant to be larger, but it was stopped at its first planned interim review, after 238 patients, because the results crossed a pre-set threshold for futility or harm. The main measure combined death within 28 days with still needing a ventilator, dialysis or drugs to support blood pressure at day 28. That happened to about 41% of the vitamin C group and about 30% of the placebo group, a difference that fell just short of conventional statistical significance. Time to leaving hospital alive was not improved. Death within 28 days, however, was roughly twice as common with vitamin C (15.0% against 7.6%), and in-hospital deaths were also higher (23.3% against 16.1%).

The authors conclude that high-dose intravenous vitamin C did not help patients with severe burns and is possibly harmful. Because the trial stopped early, the size of any harm is uncertain, and the abstract does not explain why it might occur.

What this does not mean: the study used doses many hundreds of times larger than anything in food, delivered straight into the bloodstream of critically ill people. It says nothing about vitamin C serums applied to the face, which act on the skin surface, or about ordinary dietary vitamin C. It is a useful reminder, though, that "antioxidant" is not a guarantee of benefit. Whether vitamin C helps depends on the dose, the route and the problem being treated, and that has to be tested rather than assumed.