The Popular Longevity and Anti-Aging supplement that is used by many BioHackers to improve neurological and cardiovascular health has been found by the University of Missouri to increase the risk of breast cancer that metastasizes to the brain.
Associate Professor of chemistry Elena Goun lead a team at the University of Missouri that found that larger than normal levels of Nicotinamide Riboside caused this risk in addition she said:
“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,” Goun said.
“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,” Goun said. “Because of this lack of knowledge, we were inspired to study the basic questions surrounding how vitamins and supplements work in the body.”
Abstract from research:
Nicotinamide riboside (NR) is a form of vitamin B3 and is one of the most studied compounds for the restoration of cellular NAD+ levels demonstrating clinical potential in many metabolic and age-related disorders.
Despite its wide commercial availability as a powerful nutraceutical, our understanding of NR uptake by different cells and tissues is greatly limited by the lack of noninvasive in vivo imaging tools limiting its clinical translation.
Here, we report the development and validation of a bioluminescent NR uptake probe (BiNR) for non-invasive longitudinal imaging of NR uptake both in vitro and in vivo. In addition, we optimized an assay that allows monitoring of NR flux without the need to transfect cells with the luciferase gene, enabling the use of the BiNR probe in clinical samples, as demonstrated with human T cells.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956566322008661?via%3Dihub