Nattokinase and the heart

my name's son Jacob tar I'm a cardiologist New York now several people who um are kind enough to watch this channel have written to me and said Dr Gupta could you please talk about natakinas and the reason I did not comply with this request was simply because I did not know anything about natakinas you see in medical school I did not receive any education at all in nutrition which seems crazy now however after spending the best part of my life practicing medicine I've realized how limited our medicines are at preventing heart disease and in my interest in nutritional and natural remedies has been ignited I've now done some reading around natokinase and feel able to share some of my insight with all of you right so before we talk about natokinase we need to know about natto because natokinase is found in natto natto is a cheese-like food which is made of soybeans which have been fermented with a bacterium called bacillus subtilis s-u-b-t-i-l-i-s natto has been consumed as a traditional food in Asian countries for several thousand years and natto consumption is believed to be a significant contributor to the longevity of the Japanese for a long time it was not very clear to scientists as to why NATO consumption was linked with good cardiovascular help in 1987 there was a breakthrough when it was discovered that natto contained a potent enzyme called natural kinase and perhaps it was the natural kinase in the natto that was responsible for the benefit scene incidentally natto is also a very good source of vitamin K2 and I've recently done a video on the benefits of vitamin K2 and heart health and it's worth if you haven't seen it's worth checking out because I think it's quite an interesting video right the dose of natokinase is measured in Fu fibrinyl fibrinolytic units okay 50 grams of natto has about 1500 Fu of NATO kinase in it this will be useful later on as I go a little bit further into this now there have been many experiments done to study the benefits of natokinase but most of these have been done in the lab in test tubes and in animal models so the animal models are usually rats and mice they've been very few studies done in human beings and this is why one has to be very careful in assuming that all the benefits that have been purported in lab studies could also apply to humans in any case I will share what we know about natakinas so far now natokinase is thought to have fibrinolytic and anticoagulant properties which means that at least in the laboratory in test tubes it has been shown to prevent the formation and improved the breakdown of blood clots as you know heart attacks drugs and pulmonary emboli are all caused by formation of blood clots within blood vessels and the blood clot would then stop blood from getting through and this leads to Suffocation and death of cells this is why we rely on medications such as aspirin or even anticoagulants like warfarin to stop or treat blood clot formation however these medications carry the increased risk of bleeding side effects and therefore they're only used in high risk patients the idea of a natural anticoagulant therefore is very attractive and there have been several experiments using nattokinase in rats and a scientist called Fujita studied the effects of natokinase is on chemically induced thrombosis in the common carotid artery of rats and he found that nacho kinase was four times more effective than plasmin at dissolving the clots in addition natokine is at a dose of 2836 Fu dissolved 88 of the blood clots that had been induced within six hours there have also been other studies looking into chemically induced pulmonary embolite blood clots in the lungs in rats and natokinase has been found to reduce clot formation and improve survival in these rats hence it not only reduces clot formation I it has antithrombotic properties but it also dissolves clot I it has fibrinolytic properties at least in rats we can't be 100 sure about humans I will however talk to you about some human studies that have been done there are very few that I could find and the ones that exist have enrolled only a very small number of patients and looked at surrogate markers rather than hard outcomes such as death heart attacks or Strokes there's a study by a researcher called Sia hsia where they asked 45 subjects and these subjects are considered healthy volunteers patients with cardiovascular risk factors and patients undergoing dialysis and they asked these patients to take two capsules of natokinase each capsule was 2 000 nephew daily for two months and they then measured the effect of taking the NATO kinase on plotting factors in the blood and they found that the levels of fibrinogen factor 7 factor 8 all decreased by seven to nineteen percent in all three groups suggesting that maybe by reducing these clotting factors NATO kinase may have benefits in terms of reduction of clot formation there was another study by kurosava atal where they studied the effects of natural kinase and compared it to Placebo in 12 healthy volunteers and they concluded that a single dose of natokinase seem to enhance anticoagulation and fibrinolysis compared to placebo whilst this is all interesting it's not enough unfortunately to recommend native kinase as an alternative to current therapies for the prevention of blood clots until we have data in a much larger cohort of patients and we need really to study hard end points you know it's okay yes it reduces clotting factors what we're not interested in is if you think about it we're not really interested in whether it reduces clotting factors what we're interested in knowing is does it prevent death does it prevent heart attacks does it prevent strokes and unfortunately we don't have those data yet so until we have such data we can't take NATO kinase with any level of confidence that this will do what it is supposed to do or at least purports to do in a lab now another benefit that has been talked about is NATO kinase may have a role as a blood pressure lowering agent in lab studies natural kinase has been found to inhibit Angiotensin converting enzyme Ace this is an enzyme that is responsible for increasing blood pressure and that's why one of the types of medications we use for blood pressure are ACE inhibitors right so anything that inhibits Ace may have blood pressure lowering effects NATO kinase has been found to inhibit Ace so does it lower the blood pressure and in 2008 there was a study by chemical where they took 86 patients with pre-hypertension or stage 1 hypertension and found that natokinase reduce the systolic blood pressure the top value by 5.5 millimeters of mercury and the diastolic blood pressure by 2.8 millimeters of mercury similar results were also found in a study of 79 patients by Jensen natal in 2016. these are better data but again it would be so much more comforting to see these results replicated in a much larger cohort of patients you see the problem is that when you do studies in small numbers the benefits are greatly magnified and or the risks are magnified and actually when you do the same study involving thousands and thousands of patients you'll find that the benefits aren't as great and the risks aren't that's great this is just the very nature of clinical studies and actually incidentally a more recent study which I'll discuss a little later published in 2021 actually suggested that when nacho kinase was used in a larger cohort of patients 265 patients it did not reduce blood pressure more than placebo so again a little bit confusing but that's what the data are natokinase is also thought to have cholesterol lipid lowering properties in animal studies they found that natokinase that hide is a 6500 Fu if taken for 26 weeks reduced total cholesterol reduced LDL cholesterol so that's bad cholesterol LDL reduce triglycerides and increased HDL HDL is generally considered as good cholesterol so it reduced bad cholesterol and it increased good cholesterol this was taking it for 26 weeks at a dose of 6500 fu subsequently another study was done which looked at slightly lower doses doses of 4 000 nephew over eight weeks and this did not show similarly significant results so maybe that could be because they didn't study it for long enough this was eight weeks compared to the previous study which was 26 weeks uh this was a lower dose as well a 4 000 Fu compared to 6500 Fu so it's not quite clear-cut and again we need more studies we need studies and a larger number of patients another thing that natakain is has been fought to property it has been thought to um possess is neuroprotective properties so in the lab it has been shown to degrade amyloid fibrils and therefore there has been some suggestion that it may be beneficial in amyloid-related conditions such as Alzheimer's disease there have been small studies in Rat and mice with chemically induced dementia which have shown that natokinase could have benefits but again there are no studies that have been done in a large enough cohort of humans to support its use for prevention or treatment of dementia now given its potential benefits and lowering of blood pressure and reducing cholesterol levels scientists have become interested in knowing whether natokinase supplementation could prevent or delay or even reverse atherosclerosis the hardening of arteries that leads to coronary artery disease and in 2017 Ren and a scientist called Ren assigned 82 patients to receive either 6 000 Fu of natural kinase or 20 milligrams of simvastatin daily for 26 weeks and his team measured carotid artery into mold thickness and carotid artery block size and they found that the natokinase arm had a 36.6 reduction in carotid artery clock size compared to only 11.5 percent in the Statin arm so they said oh natokinase is better than statins this was only a small study and therefore it obviously needed a slightly larger study the subsequent study was done and it was published in 2021 it looked at 265 patients who were randomized to natokinase two thousand nephews so lower dose versus placebo and they concluded that after three years there was no significant difference in terms of subclinical asterisk business prevention or even blood pressure so overall whilst natokinase does seem to have some beneficial properties in the test tube or and also in animal models we really do not have high quality data in humans to be confident of its benefits in human beings clearly more work is needed clearly more research is warranted the problem is unfortunately I don't think there's going to be much research on this because most of the researchers driven by pharmaceutical companies and pharmaceutical countries are not going to be interested in something that doesn't make the money so there will continue to remain a gap in our knowledge and My worry is that obviously you know there are a lot of people out there who understandably don't have confidence in pharmaceutical agents they want natural alternatives when they read about all the benefits of natakinas they may be tempted to try out natokinase as an alternative to what is recommended and unfortunately no one can really feel confident that the reason they're taking it will um will be you know they'll benefit from it because of this lack of data so for no other reason I would call upon people to do more research looking at this and answering conclusively the question is it beneficial and if it is then you know it sounds like a wonderful thing to do um of course you know the problem all says different studies look at different um end points different studies use different dosages and it would be quite nice to get some kind of conclusive data you know from a big study which has been designed properly which has recruited lots of patients which are which is studying it at different dosages Etc and that would be really helpful so as far as in terms of longevity and prevention of or reduction of risk I can't tell you what natakinase does I can tell you that it has promising properties but I can't tell you what it does what I would be quite interested however in knowing is whether taking matakinase improves quality of life because when it comes to quality of life you may not necessarily need to wait for these large big studies you know quality of life is a very subjective thing so anecdotal data are also helpful to hear and so if you take natokines as a supplement I would be really interested for my own education and to know what benefits you have found with it has it made improved your quality of life in some way uh anyway thank you so much for listening as always I've been terrible with posting videos I've just been so busy uh the NHS is in a state of absolute meltdown at the moment so um you know all our energies are consumed in trying to keep it afloat uh but I will keep trying I hope you found this useful all the best and once again thank you for all that you do for me

Channel: York Cardiology

Views: 362,240

Keywords: Heart palpitations anxiety, Heart palpitations after eating, Heart palpitations causes, Heart palpitations symptoms, Heart palpitations treatment, Heart palpitations cure, Ventricular ectopics, Heart disease symptoms, Heart racing, Heart flutter causes, Heart palpitations at night, natto, nattokinase

Id: e4H8Cq9GkgA

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023