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.
31

Selenium

Review stage
Extracting studies
audited research papers
4

Why this is a research priority

Selenium is essential but has a narrow intake range, and observational cancer or thyroid associations can obscure null prevention trials and dose-related harm.

Questions being reviewed
  1. Does selenium supplementation prevent cancer or cancer death?
  2. Do antibody or TSH changes in Hashimoto thyroiditis improve symptoms or disease progression?
  3. How do baseline status and dose change diabetes, mortality, and other toxicity risks?
Open evidence dossier
32

Potassium

Review stage
Extracting studies
audited research papers
4

Why this is a research priority

Potassium can lower blood pressure, but food, pills, and salt substitutes are not interchangeable and kidney function or medicines can turn benefit into hyperkalemia risk.

Questions being reviewed
  1. Which potassium doses lower blood pressure, and in whom is the response largest?
  2. Do potassium strategies reduce stroke, cardiovascular events, or mortality?
  3. How do kidney disease and potassium-raising medicines change hyperkalemia risk?
Open evidence dossier
33

Thiamin (B1)

Review stage
Extracting studies
audited research papers
4

Why this is a research priority

Thiamin replacement is essential in deficiency, but heart-failure, critical-illness, and high-dose neurologic claims require population- and outcome-specific boundaries.

Questions being reviewed
  1. Who needs urgent thiamin treatment, and is one parenteral dose regimen proven superior for Wernicke encephalopathy?
  2. Does intravenous thiamin improve mortality or recovery in critical illness or septic shock?
  3. Beyond correcting deficiency, does thiamin improve cardiac function, symptoms, or exercise capacity in chronic heart failure?
Open evidence dossier
34

Riboflavin (B2)

Review stage
Extracting studies
audited research papers
4

Why this is a research priority

Riboflavin has a plausible migraine-prevention signal and a genotype-specific blood-pressure hypothesis, but both are easily generalized beyond the studied doses and populations.

Questions being reviewed
  1. Does riboflavin reduce migraine frequency or duration, and how certain is the dose-response evidence?
  2. Does riboflavin lower blood pressure generally or only in selected MTHFR-genotype groups?
  3. Which doses and durations have been tested, and what tolerability or long-term safety limits remain?
Open evidence dossier
35

Niacin (B3)

Review stage
Extracting studies
audited research papers
4

Why this is a research priority

Niacin improves lipid biomarkers, but modern outcome trials show that biomarker change does not guarantee cardiovascular benefit and identify important metabolic and other harms.

Questions being reviewed
  1. Do niacin-related changes in HDL, LDL, and triglycerides reduce cardiovascular events?
  2. Does niacin add clinical benefit to effective statin-based treatment, and what remains known about monotherapy?
  3. How do dose and formulation change diabetes, liver, flushing, bleeding, infection, and other adverse-event risks?
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 ↗