What are the effects of a lack of vitamin K?
Lack of vitamin K causes coagulopathies, that is, difficulty in clotting the blood. This can cause subcutaneous bleeding and even anemia in more serious cases.
In humans, the risk of vitamin K deficiency is increased in older adults, in adults with chronic kidney problems, and in newborns.
The problem with newborns is that they do not have vitamin K reserves, they do not have an intestinal flora that synthesizes it, and breast milk is not very rich in vitamin K, so in the first three months of life there may be a risk of suffer from hemorrhagic disease of the newborn.
If you want to know the functions of vitamin K, you can read them in our article: The functions of vitamin K.
How to avoid the problems of lack of vitamin K?
To avoid the lack of vitamin K in newborns, it has been chosen in many countries to give a dose of vitamin K intramuscularly to the newborn, rapidly increasing its reserves.
There are medical situations, such as in the case of some heart problems or venous thromboembolism, in which it is necessary to control blood clotting. To do this, drugs called “vitamin K antagonists” can be used, that is, drugs that will not allow vitamin K to act, preventing clotting. Among them are warfarin and acenocoumarol (Sintrom®).
In these cases, it is vitally important to control the amount of vitamin K in the diet, since changes in the daily or weekly dose of vitamin K may cause the amount of medicine to be changed.
Except in babies, in few cases supplementation with vitamin K is necessary, since it is rare that the diet does not contain the minimum amounts that are needed per day.