Dr Paul Clayton’s Health Newsletter Autumn 2015
Vitamin K, and especially vitamin K2, has an important role in maintaining healthy calcium levels in various tissues. Specifically, it is one of the keys to keeping calcium and magnesium in the bones, where it is wanted, and preventing these minerals from building up in the soft tissues where they are definitely not wanted.
Vascular calcification is a major problem in diabetes, and drives both vascular and renal disease. It is particularly prevalent when the picture is complicated by chronic kidney disease (CKD), which is relatively common in diabetics.
The Rotterdam group set up by Kees Vermeer and now led by Leon Schurgers, has done much of the research on K2. They have just published a new paper in which they showed that high dose K2 was particularly effective, in a pre-clinical model of CKD, at preventing calcification in the aorta and myocardium (Schurgers et al ’15).
These are the two tissues most often involved in this kind of calcification, and as the researchers were also able to show how K2 was exerting its beneficial effect, the case for using high dose K2 routinely in diabetics and patients with chronic kidney disease (and osteoporosis) now looks very strong.
But not on its own!
REFERENCE
Schurgers L, et al. High-Dose Menaquinone-7 Supplementation Reduces Cardiovascular Calcification … Nutrients. 2015 Aug 18;7(8):6991-7011