Unraveling the Truth About Antioxidants: ROS and disease: finding the right balance. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24999942

Antioxidant Therapies Address Common Underpinnings of These Chronic Conditions

There is not a day that goes by that healthcare practitioners don’t face challenges. Attending to many complex patients stacked back-to-back, communicating bad news to a patient, working with insurance to cover labs—most physicians encounter at least one of these, if not all three, each and every day. One of the additional challenges we face with complex patients is addressing a long list of diagnoses; as integrative providers, we often find ourselves trying to treat not just one, but often three or four health concerns in a single visit. With our broad education and tolle totum (treat the whole person) vision, it is difficult to avoid this tendency.

Fortunately, there are many nutritional therapies that address conditions we commonly see coexisting. Here, we look at factors in a set of conditions that commonly overlap: chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, and insomnia. More importantly, we discuss some shared solutions that will help the integrative practitioner support patients with these difficulties.

Common Underpinnings

It’s always a challenge to take a single, isolated nutrient and try to prove a health benefit within a research study. Unlike drugs, which mostly have a clear mode of action on their own, nutrients generally usually work synergistically with other nutrients and lifestyle factors to generate health benefits. So when a meta-analysis (review of multiple studies) of one vitamin all show a similar clinical outcome, it is a significant finding and offers some clarity on the use of a nutrient in isolation as well as in combination with others.

A paper out in the Journal of Nutrition raises an interesting notion that augmentation of Fluoextine in paediatric patients may well enhance the clinical outcomes. Putting aside for one moment the increasing challenges faced by anti-depressants to be validated as a worthwhile therapy in mild to moderate depression, plus their numerous side effect it raises an interesting possibility.[1] A safe oral supplement of ascorbates may either biochemically or circumstantially enhance recovery in young patients and that is something worth considering.[2]

In a paper published in the journal Atherosclerosis, the authors of the published article – Effect of vitamin C on endothelial function in health and disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.[1]  identified a specific improvement in one aspect related to arterial/vascular health, namely endothelial function.

The normal artery contains three layers. The inner layer, the tunica intima, is lined by a monolayer of endothelial cells (EC) that is in contact with blood. The middle layer, or tunica media, contains smooth muscle cells embedded in a complex extracellular matrix. The adventitia, the outer layer of artery, contains mast cells, nerve endings and microvessels. The direct contact of ECs with the blood flow means that they are particularly vulnerable to damage molecules in the blood on one hand, and that they have ideally “guard” roles on the other hand (i.e., sensing alterations in perfusate constituents and either responding directly or transmitting reactive signals to nearby cells, such as smooth vascular cells).

Consequently endothelial dysfunction contributes to the development of nearly all vascular diseases.

Vitamin C is commonly known to be essential to human health. However, specifically as it relates to cancer treatment, the value of vitamin C is debated and often considered a topic of scientific controversy. Cancer researchers have investigated various ways of administering high-dose vitamin C, including both orally and intravenously. Researchers have also examined different forms of vitamin C—ascorbic acid (AA) and dehydroascorbic acid (DHA)—which may well be a comparison of apples and oranges.