Preliminary evidence of effects of potassium chloride on a metabolomic path to diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Introduction: Low potassium intake can affect cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk and cardiometabolic risk factors.

Objective: We hypothesize that potassium chloride (KCl) supplementation can improve cardiovascular risk metabolomic profile.

Methods: In this secondary analysis of a pilot randomized clinical trial (RCT) of 26 participants with prediabetes randomized to KCl or placebo, we performed targeted mass-spectrometry-based metabolomic profiling on baseline and 12-week (end-of-study) plasma samples. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the many correlated metabolites into fewer, independent factors that retain most of the information in the original data.

Results: Those taking KCl had significant reductions (corresponding to lower cardiovascular risk) in the branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) factor (P = 0.004) and in valine levels (P = 0.02); and non-significant reductions in short-chain acylcarnitines (SCA) factor (P = 0.11).

Conclusions: KCl supplementation may improve circulating BCAA levels, which may reflect improvements in overall cardiometabolic risk profile.

Clinical Trials Registry: Clinicaltrials.gov identifier: NCT02236598; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02236598.