Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Vitamin K and cystic fibrosis

One of the key elements of cystic fibrosis is fibrosis (scaring) of the pancreas. I'm not so sure of the connection between pancreas and vitamin K. This is not to surprising as vitamin K is one of the vitamins and most people, myself included, have a poor knowledge about.

A study that took children and adolescents who had cystic fibrosis and tried the following three levels of supplementation (explained further after the list):

<150 µg/d (low; multivitamins/no supplement)
150–999 µg/d (middle; CF-specific vitamins) 
≥1000 µg/d

So the first level was a low daily intake from food and/or a typical multivitamin. The second level was subjects taking multivitamin designed for cystic fibrosis. The last group took high levels of vitamin K.   

Comparing the blood levels of vitamin K to "healthy" children and adolescent (so not necessary optional vitamin K status, just "normal") the only group to achieve these normal levels was the high group with ≥1000 µg/d.

What I found amazing is that this research wasn't undertaken till this year. I would have naively assumed that before a multivitamin preparation was advertised as a specific cystic fibrosis multi they would have undertaken these tests to determine what level to use. Clearly not.


Reference: Kelly A Dougherty, Joan I Schall and Virginia A Stallings Suboptimal vitamin K status despite supplementation in children and young adults with cystic fibrosis Am J Clin Nutr (June 16, 2010). doi:10.3945/ajcn.2010.29350

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