ORAL N-ACETYLCYSTEINE LOWERS PLASMA HOMOCYSTEINE IN ADULTS ON A BACKGROUND OF ANABOLIC RESISTANCE TRAINING

Lowering high plasma levels of homocysteine (tHcy) by folate/vitamin-B-supplementation only unsufficiently protects against cardiovascular diseases and dementia. To enhance therapeutic options, we evaluated whether the significant tHcy-lowering effect of oral N-acetylcysteine (NAC) in sedentary adults (-11.71% [12]) is still detectable on a background of anabolic resistance training (RT) which moderately decreases tHcy itself. Reanalysing a previous randomized controlled double-blinded clinical trial, we compared the effect of oral NAC (8 weeks 1.8 g/d, n=9) to that of placebo (n=8) on postabsorptive tHcy in healthy middle-aged subjects (tHcy 11.82±0.69 µM) undergoing 8 weeks of supervised progressive RT. NAC (+RT) led to a significantly greater reduction of tHcy (-13.97±5.81%) than placebo (+RT) (-3.85±4.81%) as confirmed by ANOVA (P<0.05) adjusting for methionine plasma levels and gain in strength. This add-on effect of NAC (~-10%) suggests that combining cysteine supplementation with RT may offer a novel (additional) option to lower tHcy in an aging population.