Vitamin K may shield against pancreatic cancer

Dietary intakes of phylloquinone and dihydrophylloquinone appear to yield a beneficial effect on the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, a study reports.

The study used data from the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening and included 101,695 individuals. All of them completed a food frequency questionnaire to assess dietary consumption of phylloquinone (vitamin K1), menaquinones (vitamin K2), and dihydrophylloquinone (dihydrovitamin K1).

The mean energy-adjusted dietary intakes of phylloquinone, menaquinones, and dihydrophylloquinone were 146.2, 11.7, and 3.9 ug/d, respectively. Participants in the highest intake quartile of dietary phylloquinone were more likely to be physically active, eating healthy, and taking single or multivitamin supplement compared with those in the lowest intake quartile.

Over a mean follow-up of 8.86 years, 361 participants developed pancreatic cancer. In the fully adjusted Cox proportional hazards regression model, the cancer risk was significantly reduced in those with high dietary intakes of phylloquinone (quartile 4 vs 1: hazard ratio [HR], 0.57, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.39–0.83; p_trend=0.002) and dihydrophylloquinone (HR, 0.59, 95 percent CI, 0.41–0.85; p_trend=0.006), with a nonlinear dose–response association (all p_nonlinearity<0.05).

There was no protective effect seen for menaquinones (HR, 0.93, 95 percent CI, 0.65–1.33; p_trend=0.816).

The associations were not altered by predefined stratification factors and was robust to sensitivity analyses.

Additional investigation is needed to establish whether the association between dietary intake of vitamin K and pancreatic cancer is causal. If it is, then increasing the consumption of foods rich in phylloquinone or dihydrophylloquinone may be an attractive strategy for the prevention of pancreatic cancer, according to the investigators.