Abstract: molecules
Comment
Comment on Ambra et al. Could Selenium Supplementation
Prevent COVID-19? A Comprehensive Review of Available
Studies. Molecules 2023, 28, 4130
Margaret P. Rayman 1, * , Lutz Schomburg 2 , Jinsong Zhang 3 , Ethan Will Taylor 4 , Gijs Du Laing 5 ,
Melinda Beck 6 , David J. Hughes 7 and Raban Heller 2
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
*
Citation: Rayman, M.P.; Schomburg,
L.; Zhang, J.; Taylor, E.W.; Du Laing,
G.; Beck, M.; Hughes, D.J.; Heller, R.
Comment on Ambra et al. Could
Selenium Supplementation Prevent
COVID-19? A Comprehensive Review
of Available Studies. Molecules 2023,
28, 4130. Molecules 2024, 29, 2466.
https://doi.org/10.3390/
molecules29112466
Academic Editors: George Grant,
Claus Jacob and Thomas J. Schmidt
Received: 7 June 2023
Revised: 7 February 2024
Accepted: 18 April 2024
Published: 24 May 2024
Copyright: © 2024 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK
Institute of Experimental Endocrinology, Charité—Universitätsmedizin, D-10115 Berlin, Germany;
lutz.schomburg@charite.de (L.S.)
State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization, School of Tea & Food Science, Anhui Agricultural
University, Hefei 230036, China
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Greensboro, NC 27402, USA; ewtaylor@uncg.edu
Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA; melinda_beck@med.unc.edu
School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science, UCD Conway Institute, University College Dublin,
D04 V1W8 Dublin, Ireland
Correspondence: m.rayman@surrey.ac.uk
The authors of this Comment are longstanding selenium investigators with a total
of 200 or more published articles on selenium; the corresponding author (Margaret P.
Rayman) has published two highly cited reviews on selenium and human health in The
Lancet (2000 and 2012), and Lutz Schomburg and his team are highly respected as selenium
researchers worldwide. We noticed that a review paper by Ambra et al. entitled “Could
Selenium Supplementation Prevent COVID-19? A Comprehensive Review of Available Studies” [1]
was recently published in Molecules in a Special Issue on “Functional Foods and Dietary
Bioactives in Human Health”, in the Section “Natural Products Chemistry”.
Ambra et al. [1] cite and discuss more than 10 papers by the authors of this Comment.
We take exception to most of their assessments of our work, but due to space limitations
will only give detailed rebuttals for two of them [2,3], as these cases are illustrative of the
inaccuracies and misinterpretations that pervade the whole review.
In the Introduction, it already seems that the role of selenium has been misrepresented—it
does not modulate the biochemical activity of several enzymes; indeed, enzymes containing
selenocysteine are the key factors. Furthermore, the effects of selenium on mortality are not
clearly described; selenium status varies across the world and is linked in a U-shape with
selenium mortality.
First, the article is not a comprehensive review of available studies, despite that
word being highlighted in the title. At least two important studies published..
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