Surplus antioxidants are pathogenic for hearts and skeletal muscle

Credit : CC0 Public Domain 

Many heart diseases are linked to oxidative stress, an overabundance of reactive oxygen species. The body reacts to reduce oxidative stress—where the redox teeter-totter has gone too far up—through production of endogenous antioxidants that reduce the reactive oxygen species. This balancing act is called redox homeostasis. 

But what happens if the redox teeter-totter goes too far down, creating antioxidative stress, also known as reductive stress? Rajasekaran Namakkal-Soorappan, Ph.D., associate professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Pathology, and colleagues have found that reductive stress, or RS/AS, is also pathological. This discovery, they say, may have clinical importance in management of heart failure.

News source : medicalxpress.com

Authors : Gobinath Shanmugam, Ding Wang, Sellamuthu S. Gounder, Jolyn Fernandes, Silvio H. Litovsky, Kevin Whitehead, Rajesh Kumar Radhakrishnan, Sarah Franklin, John R. Hoidal, Thomas W. Kensler, Louis Dell'Italia, Victor Darley-Usmar, E. Dale Abel, Dean P. Jones, Peipei Ping, and Namakkal S. Rajasekaran https://doi.org/10.1089/ars.2019.7808