Category: Cardiovascular disease

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The functions of selenium supplements

skin-cells antioxidant
Selenium is an important component of the antioxidant defense in the cells. It helps to protect against oxidative damage to both cells and DNA. It has been shown to have a protective effect against the damage to skin cells caused by ultraviolet radiation.

Why the interest in selenium facts?  Here, at the beginning of the seleniumfacts.com website, we want to review in broad terms what we know about the functions of selenium supplementation. We are especially interested in selenium’s antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects in the human body.

Selenium is an essential trace element in the human diet, and, in many regions of the world, it is an absolutely necessary nutritional supplement.  It has many and diverse functions in the human body.

One of the interesting things about selenium is that it does not perform its functions as an element or an ion.  Instead, it functions as a component of more complex compounds.  In particular, it is an essential component of the 21st amino acid, selenocysteine. read more

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Seleniumfacts.com – A New Website

Dr. Urban Alehagen, new website
Research done at the Linköping University in Sweden by Dr. Urban Alehagen and his colleagues has shown a relatively high mortality rate in elderly Swedish citizens with low selenium status. Daily supplementation with selenium and Coenzyme Q10 for five years significantly reduced the risk of death from heart disease in home-living healthy elderly Swedish citizens.

What is the idea behind a new website called seleniumfacts.com?

For the most part, what we want to do with this website is to present clinical research results from published, peer-reviewed studies of the safety and efficacy of selenium supplements.

A cousin website to the website q10facts.com
We want to try to do the same thing with seleniumfacts.com that we have been doing with q10facts.com website.

We want to report the results of human studies that have been done as randomized controlled clinical trials.  We want to present the following types of information about selenium supplementation studies and selenium status:

  • the study design
  • the sample size
  • the composition of the sample
  • the selenium form and dosage
  • the length of the study
  • the confounding factors in the study
  • the study results
  • the researchers’ interpretation of the results

Intervention studies about selenium supplementation
Basically, there are two types of human studies: observational studies and intervention studies.  The big difference between observational studies and intervention studies is that the researchers control the use of the independent variable in intervention studies but do not do so in observational studies. read more