I take 3mg to help with sleep. I have found that not all melatonin is the same. I had problems with some brands. My advice would be try a few to see which works for you.
Some brands of melatonin made me jittery, just the opposite of what it should do. Again I think this is a case of different fillers effecting everyone differently.
I take 50 mg per night. I can't tell if it helps my PSA. It's the n=1 problem, you can't do experiments on yourself, with no control population.
It certainly does not hurt me. It helps me sleep. There is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that large doses of melatonin (some people take up to 120 mg a night) improve outcomes for many kinds of cancer.
Melatonin is secreted in response to darkness in human and mammals. If taken as a food supplement it might help improving the sleep and life quality of cancer patients.
If it affects PSA, which I doubt, it could be that the underlying cancer progress has merely been masked. Talk with your doctor before start taking large doses.
Few studies. Melatonin is a natural substance that cannot be patented. Therefore, it’s difficult to find the money to do research. Research on melatonin must be sponsored by someone other than the pharma industry.
"If it affects PSA, which I doubt, it could be that the underlying cancer progress has merely been masked. Talk with your doctor before start taking large doses."
The notion that melatonin could "mask" cancer is gratuitous conjecture and not at all helpful.
Better advice, if someone is concerned about taking large doses of melatonin, is to find someone who is expert on melatonin and cancer, and talk to them. The odds of that person being your doctor are essentially zero. Most doctors know next to nothing about nutrition and nothing at all about supplements.
Your doctors should know if there are interactions with other drugs you are taking so it is good to discuss that aspect (not melatonin and cancer, where can you find those experts?).
Here is some of the research pertaining to prostate cancer and melatonin, all of it pointing toward benefit. There are no clinical trials that I am aware of for melatonin and prostate cancer, but there are for melatonin and other cancers. The last study linked to below is a meta-analysis of 21 clinical (human) studies where melatonin was used in cases of solid tumors. The conclusion was, "Melatonin may benefit cancer patients who are also receiving chemotherapy, radiotherapy, supportive therapy, or palliative therapy by improving survival and ameliorating the side effects of chemotherapy."
Melatonin for the prevention and treatment of cancer
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