It is a popular belief that ‘too much of anything is never good’ – and is also highly applicable to ‘health’. Many of us make it a point to pop in those antioxidant tablets of vitamins C and E to pamper our body with health-promoting benefits – i.e. by protecting against the damaging free radicals.
But do you know, too much of these natural antioxidants can actually lead to heart-failure?
Though, there are plenty of damaging effect-evidences of oxidative stress, the role reductive stress can play in disease has never been so clear, until this finding.
The recent groundbreaking study used mice carrying a human mutation, which is earlier linked to so-called ‘protein aggregation skeletal myopathies and cardiomyopathies.’ In this, the weakening skeletal and heart muscle contain protein-clumps.
The research-mice possessing one of the mutant genes — aB-crystallin — specifically in the heart develop similar symptoms as in human patients, showing the animals’ hearts under reductive stress.
The reductive stress, thus, might underlie other diseases, as well, the study thus opening up scopes of further investigation in protein aggregation diseases – like neurodegenerative diseases of Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease.
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