Antioxidants linked to increased spread of cancer cells in mice
19 Oct 2015
New research has found that antioxidants helped spread of cancer cells in the body. Antioxidants had been associated with lower risk of cancer but the new research could cause further confusion about our knowledge of cancer and how it spreads.
According to the research team antioxidants might be good till the time one suffered from cancer. The researchers conducted experiments on lab mice, and found that antioxidants actually accelerated the spread of the deadliest form of skin cancer. The findings have been detailed in the journal Nature.
The team of researchers was led by Dr Sean Morrison, director of the Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI). The spread of cancer from the initial body part to others, called metastasis, an inefficient process results in the vast majority of cancer cells failing to survive.
That changed in specialised mice that had been transplanted with melanoma cells from patients and then fed N-acetylcysteine (NAC), a popular man-made antioxidant used in nutritional and bodybuilding supplements.
''Administration of antioxidants to the mice allowed more of the metastasizing melanoma cells to survive, increasing metastatic disease burden,'' Morrison said in a statement.
A similar study conducted at Vanderbilt University and published in PLoS One in 2012 which involved mice with prostate cancer also showed that antioxidants appeared to increase the proliferation of cells in the pre-cancerous lesions.
In another study in rodents with lung cancer published in Science Translational Medicine in 2014, normal doses of vitamin E and smaller doses of acetylcysteine, an antioxidant supplement, appeared to cause a three-fold increase in the number of tumors and caused them to be more aggressive.
Mice given antioxidants died twice as fast the ones in the control group and the reaction appeared be dose dependent with larger doses causing a more severe reaction.
