Research review priorities

Supplement research priorities

These are research priorities, not recommendations. We selected decisions where public interest, plausible benefit, evidence maturity, and safety stakes make a careful synthesis especially useful.

priority dossiers
148
claim-level questions
444
study extraction underway
148

01 / PRIORITY

How priorities were selected

Priority reflects relevance to healthy aging, frequency of real-world use, maturity of human evidence, the cost of a wrong decision, and the need to separate a valid narrow use from broader marketing claims. It does not rank efficacy or imply that everyone should take the product.

02 / EXTRACTION

What happens next

For every question, we screen the PubMed candidate set, connect multiple publications from the same trial, extract population, dose, comparator, duration, outcomes, harms, and funding, then synthesize supportive, mixed, negative, and safety findings together.

Only screened studies enter audited study and participant totals. Search-result counts and the papers listed here as questions never become evidence by themselves.
146

Feverfew

Review stage
Extracting studies
audited research papers
1

Why this is a research priority

Migraine prevention evidence is low quality and heterogeneous, with the best trial showing only a small frequency difference.

Questions being reviewed
  1. Does a stable feverfew extract meaningfully reduce monthly migraine days?
  2. How does feverfew compare with established preventive treatments on disability and tolerability?
  3. What bleeding, surgery, mouth-ulcer, ragweed allergy, withdrawal, pregnancy, and product limits apply?
Open evidence dossier
147

Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol)

Review stage
Extracting studies
audited research papers
1

Why this is a research priority

Large primary-prevention trials are neutral for cancer and cardiovascular disease; deficiency treatment and bone indications require separate evidence boundaries.

Questions being reviewed
  1. Which deficient or high-risk populations benefit from D3 for bone and muscle outcomes?
  2. Does D3 prevent cancer, cardiovascular disease, infection, or mortality in replete adults?
  3. What calcium, kidney-stone, kidney-disease, granulomatous disease, medicine, assay, and dose limits apply?
Open evidence dossier
148

Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol)

Review stage
Extracting studies
audited research papers
1

Why this is a research priority

D2 generally raises total vitamin D less than D3, but biomarker comparisons do not define clinical equivalence or deficiency-treatment failure.

Questions being reviewed
  1. Which D2 dosing schedule reliably corrects deficiency in specific populations?
  2. Do D2 and D3 differ in fractures, falls, symptoms, or other clinical outcomes rather than serum levels alone?
  3. What calcium, kidney-stone, kidney-disease, granulomatous disease, medicine, assay, vegan-source, and dose limits apply?
Open evidence dossier

03 / SOURCES

Research standards

The review begins with federal evidence summaries and PubMed records, then moves to trial-level extraction. Product claims or another publisher’s evidence grade are not copied into the ledger.

NIH Office of Dietary Supplements ↗PubMed / NCBI ↗NCCIH ↗