ABSTRACT

Blood samples were drawn from pregnant women attending the prenatal clinic and from healthy men and women volunteers, including physicians, nurses, laboratory technicians and medical students, before they had taken any vitamin C-containing food, in the morning. Since the original observation of J. L. Parrot and G. Richet that scurvy increases the sensitivity of guinea pigs to histamine, several workers, including D. W. Dawson and C. E. West, Dawson et al., and C. M. Lewis and P. J. Nicholls, have investigated the relationship between ascorbic acid and histamine metabolism. V. Mohsenin and A. B. DuBois reported that, "the airway response to aerosolized histamine was enhanced in scorbutic guinea pigs and animals partially deficient in vitamin C." It is clear that about one third of an apparently healthy group of people in New York City has a suboptimal vitamin C status which is associated with an increased blood histamine level.