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.Folate / folic acid
- Review stage
- Extracting studies
- audited research papers
- 5
Why this is a research priority
Periconceptional benefit is established, while homocysteine, cognition, cancer-prevention, and high-dose safety claims require separate treatment.
Questions being reviewed
- How effectively does periconceptional folic acid prevent first or recurrent neural-tube defects?
- Does lowering homocysteine with folate prevent cardiovascular events or cognitive decline?
- How do dose, vitamin B12 status, fortification exposure, and cancer signals change safety?
Iodine
- Review stage
- Extracting studies
- audited research papers
- 5
Why this is a research priority
Deficiency has major developmental consequences, but routine supplementation in mildly deficient settings and excess-dose thyroid effects remain easy to overstate.
Questions being reviewed
- When does iodine supplementation in pregnancy improve maternal or child outcomes?
- Does correcting mild iodine deficiency improve cognition in children?
- How do excess intake, thyroid autoimmunity, and existing thyroid disease change risk?
Vitamin C
- Review stage
- Extracting studies
- audited research papers
- 5
Why this is a research priority
Cold, antioxidant, cardiovascular, cancer, blood-pressure, and high-dose claims span very different outcomes and risk profiles.
Questions being reviewed
- Does regular or treatment-only vitamin C prevent colds or shorten their duration?
- Does supplementation prevent cardiovascular events, cancer, or premature death?
- Are short-term blood-pressure changes clinically meaningful, and who is at risk from high-dose oxalate or kidney stones?
Vitamin E
- Review stage
- Extracting studies
- audited research papers
- 5
Why this is a research priority
Large prevention trials show little benefit and identify dose- and outcome-specific harms that broad antioxidant language can obscure.
Questions being reviewed
- Does vitamin E prevent cardiovascular disease, cancer, or death in generally healthy adults?
- What do prostate-cancer and heart-failure signals mean for high-dose use?
- How do hemorrhagic stroke, anticoagulants, and vitamin K interactions change safety?
Plant sterols/stanols
- Review stage
- Extracting studies
- audited research papers
- 4
Why this is a research priority
Plant sterols reliably change LDL cholesterol, but delivery format, timing, long-term safety, and the absence of clinical-outcome trials are easy to obscure.
Questions being reviewed
- How much do plant sterols or stanols lower LDL, and how does dose change the effect?
- Do capsules work like enriched foods, and how do meal timing and food carrier matter?
- Are cardiovascular events reduced, and what is known about long-term safety and fat-soluble vitamins?
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.