A popular ‘healthy ageing’ vitamin supplement marketed as improving cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological health may actually increase your cancer risk.
A team of researchers at the University of Missouri demonstrated in a study that excessively high levels of NR can not only raise your risk of cancer but act as a trigger for the cancer to metastasise – or spread – to the brain.
Nicotinamide riboside (NR) is a form of vitamin B3 sold over the counter in Australia as a ‘healthy ageing’ supplement that can help manage high cholesterol and high blood pressure, obesity and even prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
NR naturally occurs in many foods including dairy, wholegrains, fish and green vegetables.
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Associate Professor Elena Goun, lead author of the study, says the team was inspired to study NR in detail due to the relative lack of public knowledge when it comes to vitamins and supplements.
“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,” she says.
“Because of this lack of knowledge, we were inspired to study the basic questions surrounding how vitamins and supplements work in the body.”
Prof. Goun says her team selected NR for study as the supplement is undergoing human trials to counter the side-effects of cancer treatment.
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NR can counter some of these side-effects by increasing energy available within each cell. Unfortunately, this extra energy can be drawn on by the cancer to increase its size.
“Our work is especially important given the wide commercial availability and a large number of ongoing human clinical trials where NR is used to mitigate the side-effects of cancer therapy in patients,” she says.
“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.”
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To understand how NR is used by the cells, the team came up with a novel approach that involved staining NR with a bioluminescent ink, so NR levels could be measured in cancer cells, T-cells and healthy cells.
“The presence of NR is shown with light, and the brighter the light is, the more NR is present,” Prof. Goun says.
The research highlights the importance of investigating the potential side-effects of widely available supplements before using them.
Do you take a nicotinamide riboside supplement? Has it ever been recommended to you for cancer treatment? Let us know in the comments section below.
