Scientists from the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen have shown that melatonin given prior to chemotherapy limited nerve cell damage.
The team’s research specifically looked at chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain (CINP), and found that melatonin appeared to prevent pain caused by chemotherapy damage to nerves but did not alleviate pain when CINP had already developed, suggesting that its potential benefits could be as prevention rather than cure.
In the study published last month in the Journal of Pineal Research, it was found that melatonin reduced damage caused by chemotherapy to mitochondria, which could hold the key to preventing CINP as mitochondrial dysfunction associated with oxidative stress in peripheral nerves has been implicated in the underlying mechanism of the condition.
According to Carole Torsney from the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Integrative Physiology, who co-led the study, "CINP can have a devastating impact on patients, and may limit chemotherapy doses, with potentially serious consequences. These findings are very exciting and suggest that melatonin could prevent CINP by protecting nerve cell mitochondria. Our next steps will be to further test this theory by looking at the effect of melatonin in other pain conditions that also involve mitochondrial damage."