There is a nutritional analogy to this line of thinking: antioxidants are good for your health but in excess they flip and turn into
pro-oxidants. They end up doing exactly the opposite and cause irrevocable damage to the very mechanisms and organs they were meant to protect in the first instance".
Macrophage foam cell formation during early atherogenesis is determined by the balance between
pro-oxidants and anti-oxidants in arterial cells and blood lipoproteins.
Sodium nitroprusside or iron as
pro-oxidants stimulate the production of TBARS in mice liver and cause lipid peroxidation.
These antioxidants theoretically protect us from damage by
pro-oxidants.
These antioxidants theoretically protect us from damage by
pro-oxidants. But that explanation may be incorrect.
However, in certain situations, antioxidants can become
pro-oxidants and will elicit the opposite effect to what is desired.
Few publications have discussed about the photo-oxidation of PP in the presence of
pro-oxidants [11].
Again, we emphasize that these results are only suggestive that medication use (corticosteroids) may reduce the FeNO response induced by the
pro-oxidants of PM.
(1) as a disturbance between the
pro-oxidant and antioxidant balance in favor of the
pro-oxidants.
While the study's results have not yet been tested in people, they raise the possibility that cancer should be treated with
pro-oxidants and that cancer patients should not supplement their diet with large doses of antioxidants.
Intrinsically, cancer cells have higher basal levels of ROS which if supplemented by additional oxidative insult by
pro-oxidants can be cytotoxic, an example being Malabaricone-A (MAL-A).