Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor and this is not medical advice. I have a PhD in Nutritional Sciences and this information is educational in nature.

An Italian clinical trial peer-reviewed and published this past month in EClinical Medicine, one of the journals published by The Lancet, is nothing short of incredible.

It provides rigorous evidence that 3.2 grams per day of the amino acid L-arginine dramatically hastens the improvement in respiratory function in patients thaty already have confirmed pneumonia and are already suffering from hypoxemic respiratory distress. It may turn out to be lifesaving.

One of the things that is so remarkable about this study is that usually nutritional treatments have to be started early in the course of illness to work. For example, as I covered in my comprehensive review of the vitamin D literature, maintaining high vitamin D status is the single best thing you can do for prevention, and if administered early in the course of illness it is extremely powerful in preventing the illness from getting bad enough to put someone in the ICU. By contrast, if vitamin D is given to people who already have severe respiratory distress — at least in the standard form of vitamin D you would buy in the store — it does nothing at all.

In this case, however, the L-arginine works when things have already gotten very bad.