ArticlePloS one2018
Measuring serum melatonin in postmenopausal women: Implications for epidemiologic studies and breast cancer studies.
Article in PloS one, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Melatonin MT1 Receptor Expression in Luminal Invasive Ductal Breast Carcinoma in Postmenopausal Women.Biomolecules · 2025Article
- Melatonin and Health: Insights of Melatonin Action, Biological Functions, and Associated Disorders.Cellular and molecular neurobiology · 2023Review
- Depressive Symptoms, Sleep Profiles and Serum Melatonin Levels in a Sample of Breast Cancer Patients.Nature and science of sleep · 2020Article
- Melatonin and its ubiquitous anticancer effects.Molecular and cellular biochemistry · 2019Review
- Promising Antineoplastic Actions of Melatonin.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundCirculating melatonin is a good candidate biomarker for studies of circadian rhythms and circadian disruption. However, epidemiologic studies on circulating melatonin are limited because melatonin is secreted at night, yet most epidemiologic studies collect blood during the day when melatonin levels are very low, and assays are lacking that are ultrasensitive to detect low levels of melatonin reliably.
objectiveTo assess the performance of a refined radioimmunoassay in measuring morning melatonin among women.
methodsWe used morning serum samples from 47 postmenopausal women ages 48-80 years without a history of breast cancer who participated in the San Francisco Bay Area Breast Cancer Study, including 19 women who had duplicate measurements. The coefficient of variation (CV) and intraclass coefficient (ICC) were estimated using the random effect model.
resultsReproducibility for the assay was satisfactory, with a CV of 11.2% and an ICC of 98.9%; correlation between the replicate samples was also high (R = 0.96). In the 47 women, serum melatonin levels ranged from 0.6 to 62.6 pg/ml, with a median of 7.0 pg/ml.
conclusionOur results suggest that it is possible to reliably measure melatonin in postmenopausal women in morning serum samples in large epidemiologic studies to evaluate the role of melatonin in cancer etiology or prognosis.
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