Interesting article. I know many who use NAC here, including myself. Just ran across this and thought I'd share.
Popular Antioxidant Seems to Spread Skin Cancer Cells in Mouse Research
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Interesting article. I know many who use NAC here, including myself. Just ran across this and thought I'd share.
Popular Antioxidant Seems to Spread Skin Cancer Cells in Mouse Research
To keep it short and sweet, it's more of an opportunistic class of cancers that develop from the unique reaction between some well known biological antioxidants that we consume regularly with our diet and a type of cancer that specifically benefits from the regulatory kinetics induced by the compound. NAC is a regulator of apoptosis and has been known for quite a while that it can prolong cell life, hence it's use in quite a large amount of degenerative diseases. If malignant melanocytes can continue to proliferate at alarming rates and avoid our cellular checkpoints or sanity checks per say for initiating cell death, then theoretically yes antioxidants can increase the likelihood of cancer. However, I wouldn't think it was the mediating factor and it was more of a causation vs. association analysis.
I was a medical aid for a cancer patient when I was starting out school and it seemed like he did everything in the world to increase the metastasis of his cancer, but it didn't have any acknowledged effect.
It's just a perfect storm really!
I think there was a study not too long ago about a claim linking beta-carotene to coronary heart disease? Some bizarre study seems to come out at least once a month alluding to some insanely subjective observations linking two polar opposite events to each other.
An article I found while perusing this topic also linked beta carotene to metastasis of another specific cancer, lung I think, as NAC was with melanoma in this article; however, given the presentation of the info, I agree with your observation of, it not being a mediating factor, rather, one of association.