In the past few years, breast cancer has become the most prevalent type of cancer. The majority of patients receive combinatorial chemotherapy treatments, which may result in increased risk of developing drug resistance, a reduced quality of life, and substantial side effects. Treatment modalities that could lessen the physical toll of standard treatments or act in synergy with chemotherapeutic treatments would benefit women worldwide. Research into tocotrienols has thus far demonstrated their potential to be such an agent, with tocotrienols surpassing the pharmacological potential of tocopherols. Further research using in vitro and preclinical breast cancer models to support clinical trials is needed. This review uses bibliometric analysis to highlight this gap in research and summarizes the current and future landscape of tocotrienols as an anti-breast cancer agent.

The environment outside the Earth’s protective magnetosphere is a much more threatening and complex space environment. The dominant causes for radiation exposure, solar particle events and galactic cosmic rays, contain high-energy protons. In space, astronauts need healthy and highly functioning cognitive abilities, of which the hippocampus plays a key role. Therefore, understanding the effects of ¹H exposure on hippocampal-dependent cognition is vital for developing mitigative strategies and protective countermeasures for future missions. To investigate these effects, we subjected 6-month-old female CD1 mice to 0.75 Gy fractionated ¹H (250 MeV) whole-body irradiation at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory. The cognitive performance of the mice was tested 3 months after irradiation using Y-maze and Morris water maze tests. Both sham-irradiated and ¹H-irradiated mice significantly preferred exploration of the novel arm compared to the familiar and start arms, indicating intact spatial and short-term memory. Both groups statistically spent more time in the target quadrant, indicating spatial memory retention. There were no significant differences in neurogenic and gliogenic cell counts after irradiation. In addition, proteomic analysis revealed no significant upregulation or downregulation of proteins related to behavior, neurological disease, or neural morphology. Our data suggests ¹H exposure does not impair hippocampal-dependent spatial or short-term memory in female mice.