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Unraveling the Truth About Antioxidants: ROS and disease: finding the right balance

Nature Medicine volume 20, pages 711–713 (2014)Cite this article

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Sometimes the most firmly held scientific beliefs turn out to be completely wrong. For instance, Ptolemy's intrinsically simple, albeit misguided, hypothesis of a geocentric universe persisted as fact for well over a thousand years. Hippocrates's notion of the 'four bodily humors' also dominated medical thinking for a similar period of time. And for those who believe such errors are confined to the distant past, the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Egas Moniz for his pioneering development of the therapeutic lobotomy.

Such historical lessons might be helpful for those currently struggling to understand whether the widely held belief that oxidative stress contributes to a host of age-related diseases might in fact be incorrect. For years, accumulating evidence suggested that reactive oxygen species (ROS) increase in various disease states. What naturally flowed from these observations was the seemingly obvious conclusion that treating patients with antioxidants, to reduce or counteract these potentially harmful ROS, would protect against a myriad of diseases. The growing realization that this firmly held belief has proven to be completely unsubstantiated by clinical practice1, leaves us to wonder which of our assumptions were wrong and what part of the data we unintentionally missed.

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Figure 1: The good and bad of ROS.

Debbie Maizels/Nature Publishing Group

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hiroyuki Kawagishi and Toren Finkel are at the Center for Molecular Medicine, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.,

    Hiroyuki Kawagishi & Toren Finkel

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  1. Hiroyuki Kawagishi
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  2. Toren Finkel
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Correspondence to Toren Finkel.

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Kawagishi, H., Finkel, T. Unraveling the Truth About Antioxidants: ROS and disease: finding the right balance. Nat Med 20, 711–713 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm.3625

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