Effect of Vitamin D Supplementation on Relapse-Free Survival Among Patients With Digestive Tract Cancers: The AMATERASU Randomized Clinical Trial.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 439 patients were involved.

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

Enrollment began in January 2010 and follow-up was completed in February 2018.

Patients aged 30 to 90 years with cancers of the digestive tract from the esophagus to the rectum, stages I to III, were recruited.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

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

Blinding on both sides kept the patients and researchers unaware of who received Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Some patients received a placebo instead of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, giving a reference point.

The AMATERASU trial, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial conducted at a single university hospital in Japan.

Of 439 eligible patients, 15 declined and 7 were excluded after operation.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Cholecalciferol, Dietary Supplements, Disease-Free Survival, Gastrointestinal Neoplasms, Neoplasm Recurrence, Local, Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide and Postoperative Care.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc in 439 patients.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

Results are reported in around 13 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2019 (JAMA), a journal based in United States.

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