Your liver is vital for a number of important bodily functions. It's necessary for filtering blood, making bile, processing and hooking fats to carriers, storing sugars, helping the body transport and save energy, and making proteins. Your liver also helps with metabolizing many medications, storing vitamins and minerals, and breaking down and recycling red blood cells. People with liver disease cannot store vitamin K, which can lead to other complications. Synthetic vitamin K can cause liver damage in people with healthy livers.
Vitamin K
Stored in your body's fat tissue and liver, vitamin K helps your blood clot properly, is vital for the health of your bones and is necessary to reduce the risk of fractures, especially in women who are at risk for osteoporosis. Vitamin K also helps reduce the risk of bleeding in patients with liver disease and malabsorption syndromes, and may be able to prevent liver cancer. In the United States, newborn babies are given vitamin K injections to prevent hemorrhaging.
Deficiency
Though vitamin K deficiency is rare, it can result in hemorrhaging. People who are at risk for vitamin K deficiency are people with gallbladder disease, biliary disease, cystic fibrosis, celiac disease, Crohn's disease and liver disease. Use of blood-thinning medications, continuing hemodialysis and serious burns also may lead to vitamin K deficiency.
Types of Vitamin K
There are three types of vitamin K. Vitamin K1 is found naturally in leafy, green vegetables and also is available as a dietary supplement. Vitamin K2 is made by bacteria in the intestines. Some countries use vitamin K2 as a supplement, but only small amounts can be absorbed. Vitamin K3--also called menadione--is a purely synthetic form of vitamin K that was previously used to treat Vitamin K deficiency in newborns. But vitamin K3 can cause severe liver damage and has been banned as an over-the-counter supplement by the Food and Drug Administration.
Liver Damage
Liver damage--whether or not from vitamin K3--can result in cirrhosis of the liver, liver failure and illness in other parts of the body, gastrointestinal bleeding, liver cancer, peptic ulcers that erode the stomach lining and encephalopathy, and may lead to coma.
Vitamin K3
In addition to causing liver damage, vitamin K3 can interfere with the function of the natural antioxidant glutathione, which can result in damage to cell membranes. Vitamin K3 injections can also cause jaundice and hemolytic anemia in infants.
Member Comments