Effect of Vitamin D Supplements on Relapse or Death in a p53-Immunoreactive Subgroup With Digestive Tract Cancer: Post Hoc Analysis of the AMATERASU Randomized Clinical Trial.

What Was Tested

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

This trial included patients at a single university hospital in Japan with digestive tract cancers between January 2010 and February 2018 followed up for a median (IQR) of 3.5 (2.5-5.3) years to compare the effects of vitamin D supplementation with placebo and was reported in 2019.

Who Took Part

The study group was 417 participants.

PubMed indexes the participants as older adults, men only.

Patients from among 417 participants in the AMATERASU trial whose residual serum samples were available were included.

How the Study Was Run

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

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc group and the comparison group should start out alike.

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.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc group a baseline to be compared against.

This was a post hoc subgroup analysis of the AMATERASU randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial.

Data were analyzed from October 20 to November 24, 2022.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Vitamin D, Neoplasm Recurrence, Local, Vitamins, Dietary Supplements, Gastrointestinal Neoplasms, Cholecalciferol and Chronic Disease.

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 417 participants.

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

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 9 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2023 (JAMA network open), a journal based in United States.

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