The effect of menaquinone-7 supplementation on circulating species of matrix Gla protein

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc could be set against what happens without it.

A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was performed.

At baseline, after 4 and 12 weeks, desphospho-uncarboxylated MGP (dp-ucMGP), desphospho-carboxylated MGP (dp-cMGP) and total uncarboxylated MGP (t-ucMGP) were measured by ELISA techniques.

Furthermore, the ratio of uncarboxylated osteocalcin (ucOC) to carboxylated osteocalcin (cOC) was used as proxy of vitamin K status and various cardiovascular risk factors were measured.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Biomarkers, Calcium-Binding Proteins, Carboxylic Acids, Dietary Supplements, Down-Regulation, Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay and Extracellular Matrix Proteins.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2012 (Atherosclerosis), a journal based in Ireland.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.