Talk:Pro-oxidant

Reducing agents
With regards to the homocysteine section, it should either be noted that reducing agents can only cause oxidative stress after redox cycling. Reducing agents on their own are the exact opposite of oxidizing agents and will in fact serve to neutralize the oxidative capabilities of reactive oxygen species. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.65.87.238 (talk) 05:27, 4 February 2008 (UTC)


 * Good point, thank you. Tim Vickers (talk) 17:20, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Uh, technically, redox cycling involves the repeated working of this mechanism,  taking advantage of spin-orbit coupling thru a heavy atom to get around the spin-forbidden nature of transferring an electorn directly to oxygen.  But whatever.

The point is that most, if not all strong reducing agents can also act as pro-oxidants. Sometimes this can cause gross confusion as to whether a particular reducing agent is causative of a disease or an antioxidant protective reaction. The classic example is uric acid. There is a big fight right now in the stroke literature about whether the hyperuricemia commonly found in stroke patients causes the stroke or is a protective reaction. In a forthcoming letter in the journal Stroke, after nearly four decades, I have finally come down off the fence and voted "protective". For more, go to pubmed and search "uric acid" and "stroke" for the references. I'll post them here when I get the time.Pproctor (talk) 21:15, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

That homocysteine section should be deleted. Evidently it's an unsuitable example to use in this article. A study in 2001 (Zappacosta et all, Is homocysteine a pro-oxidant?, Free Radic Res. 2001 Nov;35(5):499-505) disproved the idea that homocysteine is a pro-oxidant. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11767408 --Zymatik (talk) 23:02, 30 April 2012 (UTC)