Vitamin E and Coagulation

Coagulation, also referred to as blood clotting, is a process during which several components of your blood come together to prevent excessive bleeding when a blood vessel is damaged. Several different proteins in your blood, called coagulation factors, ensure your blood can clot normally. Vitamin E is essential in ensuring that your blood doesn't clot abnormally.

Physiology

When a blood vessel is cut or damaged, the smooth muscle of the blood vessel wall will contract to signal the release of proteins from the blood vessel wall. These proteins allow platelets to clump together to block the cut in the blood vessel wall and prevent a minor cut from causing excessive bleeding. Once the blood vessel heals, your body dissolves the blood clot naturally. While the blood clotting process is important to keep you from bleeding excessively, an abnormal formation of blood clots can be dangerous.

Vitamin E and Coagulation

Vitamin E acts as an anticoagulant, which means it inhibits blood platelets from clotting abnormally. Without proper amounts of vitamin E in your blood, blood platelets could clump together and form abnormal clots in your blood vessels to block the normal flow of blood. The formation of blood clots increases your risk of heart attack and stroke.

Vitamin E also helps prevent abnormal blood coagulation by changing the physiology of the cells that line your blood and lymph vessels. This change decreases the stickiness of these vessels and reduces the chance that platelets could stick to the walls of the blood vessels and form a blood clot.

Vitamin E Recommendations

To ensure your body contains enough vitamin E to keep blood from clotting abnormally, it is important to consume adequate amounts of vitamin E in your diet each day. Both male and female adults require 15 mg of vitamin E daily. Some sources of naturally-occurring vitamin E include almonds, sunflower seeds, sunflower oil, peanuts, peanut butter, spinach and broccoli. Many fortified cereals also contain vitamin E.

Considerations

Because vitamin E acts as an anticoagulant, excessive vitamin E can actually increase your risk of hemorrhage, or uncontrollable blood loss from blood vessels. To prevent hemorrhage, the Food and Nutrition Board set the upper limit for vitamin E from supplements and fortified foods at 1,000 mg per day.

You should talk to your doctor before taking any type of supplement. If you are taking anticoagulant medications, as well as vitamin E supplements, it is especially important to be monitored by your doctor regularly.