A Study: Benefits of Supplements – Your Heart, Your Health
CoQ10 & Selenium Benefits Heart Beyond any Doubt
Does taking supplements improve health in any meaningful way? An experiment conducted in 2003 has produced a string of interesting studies concerning heart health and supplementation. The original study examined the effects and benefits of four years of supplementation in older men & women with two specific nutrients: coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) and selenium. The original study, which monitored 443 people with an average age of 78 from 2003 to 2007, revealed that supplementation of these nutrients lowered the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 41%.
The participants were given either a placebo or 200 mg of CoQ10 and 200 mcg of selenium daily for 48 months. The actual treatment group experienced less than half the cardiovascular mortality than the placebo group. It was also found that this group scored much better on tests of cardiac function and other markers of heart health (significantly lower levels of the cardiac biomarker N-terminal proBNP).
A series of subsequent studies examined the effect of those four years of supplementation years after the trial ended. The most recent study based on this experiment examined the participants of the original experiment 12 years later. What has been found is that even after 12 years, the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease was still lower among those who received CoQ10 and selenium in the original 4-year study. Through beneficial effects on inflammation, fibrosis, cardiac function and oxidative stress, the supplements were found to have protective benefits in general as well as in subgroups of participants with diabetes, hypertension and ischemic heart disease.
“The results thus validate the results obtained in the 10-year evaluation,” the most recent study concludes, “Our results show a continual and significant reduction in cardiovascular mortality during the whole follow-up period of 12 years, which also included the eight-year period after termination of the intervention.”
Written by David Gabriele
Sources
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0193120
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27367855
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26624886
https://www.worldhealth.net/news/coq10-and-selenium-supplements-cut-heart-disease-d/