There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The role and beneficial effects of antioxidants against various disorders and diseases
induced by oxidative stress have received much attention. Many types of antioxidants
with different functions play their role in the defense network in vivo. The free
radical scavenging antioxidants are one of the important classes of antioxidants and
the assessment of their capacity has been the subject of extensive studies and argument.
Various methods have been developed and applied in different systems, but many available
methods result in inconsistent results. There is no simple universal method by which
antioxidant capacity can be assessed accurately and quantitatively. In this review
article, the available methods are critically reviewed on the basis of the mechanisms
and dynamics of antioxidant action, and the methods are proposed to assess the capacity
of radical scavenging and inhibition of lipid peroxidation both in vitro and in vivo.
It is emphasized that the prevailing competition methods such as oxygen radical absorption
capacity (ORAC) using a reference probe may be useful for assessing the capacity for
scavenging free radicals but that such methods do not evaluate the characteristics
of antioxidants and do not necessarily show the capacity to suppress the oxidation,
that is, antioxidation. It is recommended that the capacity of antioxidant compounds
and their mixtures for antioxidation should be assessed from their effect on the levels
of plasma lipid peroxidation in vitro and biomarkers of oxidative stress in vivo.
Copyright (c) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.