Untangling Cardiovascular Disease, Part 2
Can We Tame the Great Killer?--A Deep Dive into the Vitamin K's, Hold Onto Your Hat
This article is dedicated to my dear brother Jeff, may he rest in peace, taken from those who loved him by a heart attack at only 59 years old. May the information I’ve spent many months researching help you, and those you love.
If you’ve not yet read Part 1, please start there. Articles in this series build on each other, so starting at the beginning is important.
When we left off in Part 1, dietary intake studies of the vitamin K’s demonstrated that higher consumption of vitamin K2 was associated with large reductions in cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality, as well as reductions in aortic calcifications. This was in contrast to dietary phylloquinone (vitamin K1) intake, which wasn’t associated with any of these outcomes.
Vitamin K1—Teasing Out Seemingly Discordant Results
A randomized controlled study of ultra-high dose phylloquinone supplementation over 3 months in diabetic patients with coronary artery disease failed to demonstrate by PET scan a reduced uptake of a certain radioactive marker into their coronary artery lesions. (Higher uptake of this marker is known to be associated with calcification and poor cardiac outcomes.)
“In patients with type 2 diabetes, neither vitamin-K1 nor colchicine significantly decreases coronary calcification activity, as estimated by 18F-NaF PET, over a period of 3 months.”
So first multiple studies show that dietary vitamin K1 doesn’t correlate with cardiovascular outcomes. Now an ultra high-dose supplementation study of vitamin K1 fails to find efficacy in reducing cardiovascular disease markers—Looks like an open and shut case against phylloquinone preventing CVD.
Except that things are rarely as simple as they seem in medicine.
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