blue light associated with prostate and breast cancer

Most of the OTC melatonin pills are massive overdoses, far more than the body produces naturally during a dark night.
The pills dose you with 15 to 30 milligrams or more; one milligram is one thousand micrograms.

The body’d natural production is measured in _micro_grams.

The risk that this poses for you to develop cancer has to be so small as to be almost infinitesimal. You are far more likely to develop a form of cancer from chemical exposure or other environmental/epigenetic factors. This thread needs to die.

Do you understand the concept of bioavailability? Or first pass metabolism?

take some warm trits and call me in the morning
.

After some more reading it seems Melatonin taken orally absolutely does pass the blood-brain barrier. Don’t know what the bioavailability is though, or how much is broken down in the gut before absorption.

Risk factors compound with one another though, and eliminating or reducing this one should be fairly easy for many people. Even if cancer risk isn’t the primary concern blue light exposure is clearly having numerous negative health affects for many people. Lack of sleep/lower sleep quality is linked with many other health conditions and overall reduced quality of life, productivity at work, etc.

Not the gut, it undergoes hydroxylation in the liver. Just because you take a 15mg dose of a medication does not mean that it is the effective concentration that your body receives.

I am not arguing that there is no health risks from exposure to blue light wavelengths. Just that there is very flawed thinking by people with no formal training.

Risk factors do not always compound and I am not sure how you came to that conclusion, it would depend on numerous factors.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/27/health/artificial-blue-light-prostate-breast-cancer-study/index.html

You can look this stuff up.

I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying here but reduction in effective dose can start by a substance being broken down by chemicals/temps independent of the body actively processing it. IDK if melatonin specifically is broken down by stomach acid though and if not, I see exactly what you meant.

Could you elaborate on this? Were the researchers in this study not properly trained/educated?

Of course they don’t in every situation, but take for example being both a cigarette smoker and heavy drinker. Obviously one doesn’t cancel the other out and in most scenarios that would be the case too. Unless there are direct opposing effects/results they will.

Nevermind, it looks like the actual definition of “compounding risk factors” are those that are multiplicative with each other. I guess “additive” would be a better term?

Edit: It’s “accruing”. TIL

What he said . . .

Since I haven’t read through the whole study itself, is that isolating this particular risk factor? News articles on medical studies have a LONG history of misinterpreting correlation as causation and ignoring any of the other research that shows they can’t study just one variable’s effects.

15% of 2 mg would be 0.3mg or 300 micrograms, you used the phrase “massive overdoses” which implied that there are significant side effects from taking such a dose. That is absolutely incorrect. I would also say correlation is not causation and the only people drawing incorrect conclusions are those in this thread.

If you want a deep dive into weighing the risk factors, this paper and those it cites will be a good start; click through for the cited sources.

I think studies of the effect of blue (or other) light sources on melatonin production and the relation of melatonin levels vs risk for these types of cancers is needed to see the whole picture.

That study simply shows a correlation between “ALAN” and cancer rates vs the whole causal chain.

Any study that primarily relies on self reporting is inherently flawed and if you don’t get that then there is no hope in me continuing to argue here.

Yep. Put those questions into Google Scholar and you’ll find much of the work you wish for has been done and published.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=melatonin+level+cancer+correlation&btnG=

I’m not going to try to summarize the field here, though. I’m just a casual reader like yourself, albeit with a bent toward looking things up in Google Scholar.

:+1:

Expose it to mass quantities of ‘Blue Light’… that will kill it post haste. . :wink:

Exactly…… :+1: . For any that do not understand, "you can look this stuff up". Google be ur’ friend…. :wink:

My wife is a clean freak and as a result the light lives ‘in’ the draw instead of on top now.

If you’re asking if I felt affected by the blue light and my sleep then no, there are many other factors that have a far greater impact on my sleep pattern. Besides I honestly think the low output of trits and glow have much less impact than other sources of light in everyday life e.g. room lighting, phones, pc’s…. etc…

Man….is it really matters? I’ve lived throughout the periods of incans, neon sticks, CFL, and now LED. I put whatever lights available in any of my rooms. None of them disrupts my cycle. When I feel sleepy I just sleep. I can easily sleep and drool in my class room, bus, closet, etc… no problem.
Perhaps I have no sensitivity at all?

What really disrupts my sleep cycle is BLF, and I enjoy it. Believe it or not.

[Clemence]

I’m stuck doing on-call work, so why not get my hands dirty in a science thread…

That’s not quite an accurate way to put it. Studies show an association, but the specific cause is not clearly known. The leading theory is the effect is secondary or tertiary due to reduced melatonin production or the reduced amount and quality of sleep that results. There are still lots of open questions.

For example, the methodology of the study Jon posted would be extremely susceptible to confounding factors like there being more LED lights in urban areas, but also more air pollution.

Doubtful. This is one of the problems I have with news reports on most blue light studies (just the news reports, not the studies themselves). They typically fail to clarify that we’re exposed to far, far higher intensities of blue light during the day than what most of these studies look at, which in the latter case is primarily light exposure during our sleeping hours.

The scientists didn’t say “may.” They said there was an association in the data they collected. A newspaper reported that as “may increase the risk of cancer,” which is not unreasonable speculation, but it’s also not very concrete.

The research I’ve found does not agree with you. Color temperature does appear to matter with melatonin suppression at 3900K roughly half that at 6100K. And brightness is at least as much of a factor as color temperature. All of the tests in that study were done at typical office light intensities, except the control was just enough room to find one’s way around.

I’ve not seen any research specific enough to identify the spike at pump emitter’s peak as a specific issue.

There has actually been some research suggesting mixed light causes less melatonin suppression than blue light alone.

Lee 821. As you can probably guess, it will reduce output a modest amount, and visibly change the tint to be more golden.

I see no reason to think a daylight tint like 5600K is a concern for daytime use. 3000K, being a big mismatch in color temperature to the normal ambient source, is not very appealing to me during the day, although I really like it around the house at night.

That is the same study Jon linked to in the first post, just hosted on a different site.

Limited, not flawed. Questionnaires are a common tool for studies on topics for which measurements are impractical, but obviously, well-chosen questions are critical.

In this case, for indoor light level while sleeping, they asked a fuzzy question with 4 possible answers, with the assumption that variation in how different people responds tends to average out in large groups. For outdoor light level, they used measured data. They evaluated both factors separately. Both demonstrated an association.

It is worth noting, however, that the measured data analysis showed a lower association (but still an odds ratio higher than 1) than the self-reported data analysis.

Fwiw, melatonin puts me under and NicOH keeps me under.

Melatonin will start to give me the fuzzies in about 20min, but if I force myself to stay awake through that, forget it. Not even another hit would put me under.

Also, chances are a few hours later when it wears off, I wake up. Hence the NicOH (niacin, 1g) to keep me under.

Best is to just stay “regular”, keep things dark, find something boring to think about.

I take Time Release melatonin.

It helps me fall sleep, and I stay asleep.

(Regular melatonin doesn't keep me asleep.)