Antioxidants May Help Spread Cancer

First, they treated the cells with powerful antioxidants, which mop up all the free radicals.

And it turns out that one of the roles Rac plays is to increase the levels of free radicals in cells.

Dr. Sean Morrison, the director of the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI), led the team of researchers. They gave the experimental group a common antioxidant called N-acetylcysteine (NAC), according to Nature World Report.

Antioxidants are compounds that can help to neutralize free radicals, natural substances that attack our cells and DNA.

That’s all great for normal cells.

While studies conducted in the past have shown that antioxidants can influence the aging process by shielding cells from damage, a recent study on mouse suggests that the very same products may also present a few serious issues from side effects.

In order to gain stability, unstable free radicals steam electrons from nearby molecules, making the other molecule a free radical, which steals electron from other molecules forming a cascade. This ends their chain reaction of cellular damage, yet can also protect cancerous cells in the process. Antioxidants function by kicking out free radicals, which form after oxygen combines with particular molecules. However, a few of those trials had to be stopped because the patients getting the antioxidants were dying faster.

Antioxidants are often promoted for their “cancer-killing” properties, but in a recent study, researchers found strong evidence to suggest that these unique molecules may actually promote the spread of certain cancer cells – a finding that could change the way doctors advise cancer patients to eat.

“While our results don’t prove that antioxidants are harmful for healthy cells, they highlight an important note of caution about giving antioxidants to people that already have cancer”, Sanz-Moreno says. They revealed that melanoma samples in the database which had come from patients whose cancers had spread also had low, or no PIG3, and indications that Rho was highly active.

The investigators utilized a specialized mice model that had been transplanted with melanoma cells from patients, which previous work showed recapitulated metastasis of human melanoma cells and was predictive of their metastasis in patients.

In other words, while most of the evidence comes from experiments with animals, it’s painting an increasingly complicated picture – far more complex than the simple “antioxidants = good” equation you might be led to believe from a lot of the information you might read online. These mice were given this antioxidant. If we remove all free radicals we may be preventing their good actions. By the end of the research, researchers are not confirmed whether antioxidants are bad for health. This contrasts strongly with the idea that antioxidants, which reduce free radicals, can help treat the disease.