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24.04.2022

Should heart failure patients be prescribed Q10?

Patients with heart failure benefit from supplementation with Q10, concludes the largest and most carefully conducted meta-study to date. Q10 improves heart function and survival.

Study
In the spring of 2022, English researchers published a meta-study in Health Technology Assessment, in which they combined and re-analyzed the results of 20 previously published trials.

All trials were in patients with heart failure. During a contraction, the patients' heart muscle was no longer able to pump enough blood into the vascular system during contraction. In the trials, researchers had studied the effect of Q10. We have written about some trials before.

In most trials the subjects received only Q10, but there were also a few trials in which the researchers gave combinations of Q10 with L-carnitine or selenium.

The duration of administration varied from 4 weeks to 2 years, the dose from 24 to 400 milligrams per day. We are, of course, just ignorant journalists, but we believe that average supplement users should take no more than 200 milligrams of Q10.

Results
Supplementation with Q10 reduced the risk of death by about thirty percent. The researchers were unable to analyze the risk of death from cardiovascular disease due to a lack of data.

Supplementation reduced the chance that the subjects had to be hospitalized because of their heart failure by 40 percent, the figure above shows.

Q10 increased the amount of blood the heart could pump into the body when it contracted. The effect was not overwhelming, but it was statistically significant.

Not found
The researchers found no indications of side effects. They also looked at whether Q10 could reduce the side effects of statins, but this was not the case. In addition, the researchers looked at whether Q10 had a greater effect in combination with selenium or carnitine, but that was not the case either.

Conclusion
Based on the available data, the English could have concluded that people with heart failure should be prescribed Q10 from their cardiologists. They calculated that this would be a worthwhile investment.

However, the studies they used for their meta-analysis contained too many methodological flaws to base a decision of this magnitude on. The reserachers believe that there should first be a good and thoroughly designed trial.

Source:
Health Technol Assess. 2022 Jan;26(4):1-128.

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