Vitamin K2 supplements thumbs down!!

[Mike41]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6766434/
 

the above placebo controlled clinical trial with measurable results showed bad results for MK-7. Also keep in mind this was a 6 month study so the effect might be quite significant for many years of supplementation.

Anyone taking any supplements should be very skeptical. These things keep on failing and this study actually shows serious harm!!

In contrast to our hypothesis, active vascular calcification on ¹⁸F-NaF PET scan tended to increase after MK-7 supplementation compared with placebo during 6-mo intervention. In addition, no effect of MK-7 supplementation on CT calcification mass was found. Therefore, this study does not support that MK-7 supplementation inhibits vascular calcification.

 

Edited July 26, 2020 by Mike41

[Dean Pomerleau]

52 minutes ago, Mike41 said:

The above placebo controlled clinical trial with measurable results showed bad results for MK-7. Also keep in mind this was a 6 month study so the effect might be quite significant for many years of supplementation

Interesting find Mike. But the study was small, the intervention was relatively short, and the so-called adverse effect of K2 Mk-7 was using a "promising" (i.e. new and unproven) measure of active calcification, the effect size by that measure was suggestive but didn't rise to the level of statistical significance, and there was no adverse effect of mk-7 supplements by the standard measure of calcification (arterial CT). 

These study weaknesses along with evidence of arterial stiffness benefits from mk-7 in larger, longer randomized trials (discussed here), makes your strong apparent skepticism about mk-7 supplementation seem a bit extreme and unjustified. 

--Dean 

[TomBAvoider]

All true, Dean - and to top it off, I supplement with an MK-7 pill! Yet, I am also aware that just as a general principle, every single time that I can think of, single vitamin or mineral supplements have eventually been found to be harmful (unless you have a frank definciency). And the pattern is very similar to all of them - studies showing good effects first and only bad effects after more studies come out. The cycle of HHD, Hope-Hype-Disappointment. Now, it cannot be excluded that K2 will prove to be the exception, but really, with that track record, what are the odds?

In general, sometimes people take a supplement, and the only reason there isn't bad press from it due to bad health effects is that it's a relatively obscure supplement, so it simply isn't studied as much and the cycle stops at Hype, without moving on to Disappointment with further studies. Such was the situation with K2 for many years, but now it appears that K2 has become less obscure so more studies have followed.

Speaking of obscure supplements, I take boron - there are almost no studies on boron, so I can't see the harm I'm probably causing myself (I take it because according to my 23andMe data - which in turn is unreliable - I'm very vulnerable to prostate cancer, and boron is supposed to help with that).

Now, maybe the study Mike highlighted is poor as Dean points out, but I figure it's only a matter of time, purely based on the pattern. Waiting for the big boot of Disappointment to drop, so far we've only heard a distant rumble of it being raised based on Mike's study.

Edited July 26, 2020 by TomBAvoider

[Dean Pomerleau]

1 hour ago, TomBAvoider said:

Every single time that I can think of, single vitamin or mineral supplements have eventually been found to be harmful (unless you have a frank definciency).

There certainly have been quite a few examples of the phenomena of disappointment with initially promising supplements. But I think it's worth pointing out that your conjecture about the universality of this phenomena is impossible to prove wrong since you can always claim that any supplement (be it MK-7, glucosamine or heck the statins you are taking) that have been around a while without evidence of (significant) harm will eventually be proven harmful, we just have to wait a bit longer for the right studies to be done.

In the meantime, we have to live our lives and make choices based on our personal circumstances and the best evidence available at the time, like you and I have discussed before in the context of personalized medicine.

--Dean

[Mike41]

V

Edited July 27, 2020 by Mike41

[Mike41]

2 hours ago, Dean Pomerleau said:

There certainly have been quite a few examples of the phenomena of disappointment with initially promising supplements. But I think it's worth pointing out that your conjecture about the universality of this phenomena is impossible to prove wrong since you can always claim that any supplement (be it MK-7, glucosamine or heck the statins you are taking) that have been around a while without evidence of (significant) harm will eventually be proven harmful, we just have to wait a bit longer for the right studies to be done.

In the meantime, we have to live our lives and make choices based on our personal circumstances and the best evidence available at the time, like you and I have discussed before in the context of personalized medicine.

--Dean

Yeah but statins have massive use and massive clinical trial to back them up. 100s of millions of users and decades of Huge intensive clinical trials. Supplements OTOH are a part of a dietary factor that gets some press and we then decide to eat pills rather than just include it as part of our diet and as Tom so eloquently describes it Sometimes, eventually, We find it was either useless or even harmful. But it takes forever because thatS how it works with non patented substances. So we are always decades behind and in the meantime we gulp them down and we don’t even have the excuse of a pathology like high ldl!

[Ron Put]

I have to agree with Dean.  The preponderance of the evidence suggests to me that reasonable m-7 supplementation is beneficial since it appears that most Western populations are deficient to one extent or another.  For what it's worth, I am literally the only person I know where I live who eats natto with any regularity and this includes my relatively sizeable number of Japanese and Korean friends 🙂