Research on the role of vitamin K for cognitive health support

Andrea Fuso, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Clinical Biochemistry and Clinical Molecular Biology at the Department of Experimental Medicine, Sapienza University of Rome. He is also a member of the Interdepartmental Center for Research in Neurobiology “Daniel Bovet” (CRiN) at Sapienza, an associate editor for Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences and Frontiers in Epigenetics and Epigenomics, review editor for Frontiers in Nutrition, and member of the editorial board of Clinical Epigenetics and Epigenomes.
In this interview, he explains research on how vitamin K supports more than bone health, highlighting recent research on its role in cognition support and its potential combination of S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAMe).

Transcript

Nutritional Outlook: What does scientific evidence show about the role of vitamin K2 within epigenetics and, by extension, cognitive health?

Andrea Fuso: Yes, we actually started to work on this aspect. We collaborate with a company which is Gnosis by Lesaffre since 25 years, and we collaborated first on the SAMe studies on cognitive health and in the prevention of neural deficit and so on. And more recently, we started to work on vitamin K, specific form of vitamin K2, because in the recent years, it's becoming clear that Vitamin K is not just involved in bone homeostasis and in coagulation processes, but it can have an effect on brain health as well and on cognitive aspects, probably mainly in relation to an anti-inflammatory activity exerted by this vitamin.

So we started some study in in our neurodegenerative in vitro and in vivo models, looking for a contrast over neuroinflammation. Neuroinflammation is today one of the first and let's say ubiquitous causes of brain diseases, moving from the normal cognitive decline to go to the neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's disease. Neuroinflammation, sustained and chronic neuroinflammation, is strictly related to this kind of pathology, of this kind of cognitive decline. So we were looking actually just for the effect on the production of specific inflammatory cytokines, inflammatory molecules. Working on this aspect, we surprisingly found out that vitamin K may have an epigenetic effect, which means it may modulate the expression of the mRNA coding for specific cytokines, modulating DNA methylation. We don't know yet which is the direct correlation between vitamin K and DNA methylation. For some we know the correlation because of the one-carbon metabolism. For vitamin K, we don't know which is the correlation, so we this is, at present, just an observational data. We see that giving the vitamin K, we observe an accurate methylation of cytokines like IL-1β, IL-6 that are proinflammatory cytokines. And so we have an alteration in the expression of the genes. And of course, much more studies are needed to explore this aspect.

The very interesting point, if I may, is the is the combination of these molecules, combination of SAMe and Vitamin K, because they seem to act on different but complementary processes, comparative reactions, SAMe through DNA methylation and antioxidant production, Vitamin K through modulation of the neuro inflammatory processes. And this is really important when studying the cognitive decline associated to aging, because the cognitive decline seems to have multifactorial etiology, so we have many different also environmental causes linked to cognitive decline or to neurodegeneration. We have also multiple molecular pathways related to cognitive decline, not just neuroinflammation, but neuroinflammation oxidation, alteration of the blood brain barrier, alteration of mitochondrial function, and one-carbon metabolism and Vitamin K metabolism seem to be quite central to all these metabolic pathways. So we are studying combination of these two molecules with the attempt to find a pilot for the regulation of multiple molecular pathways that can be deregulated with aging.