A new study from an international team of researchers from the University of Missouri, and having Elena Goun as the leader, brings bad news for those who consume the dietary supplement known as nicotinamide riboside. Despite the fact that the drug is supposed to improve neurological and cardiovascular health, it has now been discovered that it may play a role in increasing the risk for breast cancer, as NeuroscienceNews.com reveals.
Not only that high levels of nicotinamide riboside (NR) can increase a person’s risk of dealing with triple-negative breast cancer, but it can also lead to cancer spreading to the brain, according to the new study in question.
Many questions are left unanswered
Even though vitamins and supplements are apparently beneficial, the harsh truth is that the scientific world still needs to know a lot about them. Under such circumstances, there’s no guarantee that those pills are indeed helpful for the person who’s taking them.
Elena Goun, the leader of the new research and also an associate professor of chemistry at MU, explained as the same publication mentioned above quotes:
Some people take them [vitamins and supplements] because they automatically assume that vitamins and supplements only have positive health benefits, but very little is known about how they actually work,
Because of this lack of knowledge, we were inspired to study the basic questions surrounding how vitamins and supplements work in the body.
The same scientist said, as NeuroscienceNews also quotes:
While NR is already being widely used in people and is being investigated in so many ongoing clinical trials for additional applications, much of how NR works is a black box—it’s not understood,
So that inspired us to come up with this novel imaging technique based on ultrasensitive bioluminescent imaging that allows quantification of NR levels in real time in a non-invasive manner. The presence of NR is shown with light, and the brighter the light is, the more NR is present.
It is generally known that supplements can’t replace healthy diets and exercise.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brings some grim statistics regarding breast cancer. According to the Government agency, each year in the US, roughly 264,000 cases are diagnosed for women and around 2,400 cases for men. Every year in the same country, roughly 42,000 women and 500 men die from breast cancer.
