The creation and analysis of a large variety of existing methods for the evaluation of integrated antioxidant properties are quite relevant in connection with a range of biological mechanisms of the antioxidants (AO) action. In this work, the existing methods are correlated with mechanisms of antioxidant action. It is shown that the results obtained by various methods are mainly incomparable. This can be connected with the implementation of various mechanisms of antioxidant action in methods. The analysis of the literature data presented in this review indicates the difficulty of creating a universal method and the feasibility of using integrated approaches based on the use of several methods that implement and combine various mechanisms of the chemical conversion of antioxidants. This review describes methods for studying the chelating ability of antioxidants, except for methods based on electron and hydrogen atom transfer reactions, which are currently not widely covered in modern literature. With the description of each mechanism, special attention is paid to electrochemical methods, as the interaction of active oxygen metabolites of radical and non-radical nature with antioxidants has an electron/proton/donor-acceptor nature, which corresponds to the nature of electrochemical methods and suggests that they can be used to study the interaction.

The increasing interest in the study of the antioxidant activity of different objects is caused by an unbalance between the formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the performance of the antioxidant system in humans under certain conditions, which leads to oxidative stress and pathological states of the organism. This article presents a brief critical review of the methods that are used to measure integrated antioxidant activity (AOA). It is shown that the most promising methods for measuring AOA are electrochemical ones, particularly potentiometry, as it best fits the nature of the processes causing oxidative stress. The article gives the theoretical rational for requirements that an oxidizer of antioxidants (AO) should meet. The work presents the thermodynamic grounds for the use of an earlier proposed mediator system, kinetics of chemical reactions between AO and the mediator system. In order to confirm reliability and accuracy of the results, numerous correlation studies were conducted, aiming to compare the data obtained with the use the proposed method and independent analytical methods. The article presents the results of the potentiometric study of AOA for a variety of objects, including individual antioxidant → nutritional supplements → food → blood and blood fractions.