[www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]

Vitamin K = VK

Recently, VKs were found to play a relevant role in extrahepatic metabolism, such as in bone and blood vessels, in energy metabolism (Tsugawa and Shiraki, 2020), and in counteracting inflammation, as VK deficiency has been associated with human diseases with inflammatory background. Until very recently, VKs were considered capable of playing a role against colorectal cancer and other cancer types (Schwalfenberg, 2017) by inhibiting the cell proliferation, including an active induction of the cell cycle arrest, and to induce apoptosis in different human gastrointestinal cancer cells (Orlando et al., 2015). VKs also improve cognitive function in elderly patients and decrease the risk of diabetes (Schwalfenberg, 2017). At least some of these emerging roles may also be related to the VK involvement in signaling as modulators of selected nuclear receptors. Accordingly, VK2 (menaquinone-4) binds to the transcription factor SXR/PXR, thus acting like a hormone like other lipophilic vitamins. Therefore, its effects are widely spread in body systems, and it is recognized to increase longevity (Gordeladze, 2017).

Since the last century (Krasinski et al., 1985) certain chronic gastrointestinal disorders were associated with VK deficiency. At present this connection is established with Crohn’s disease (Schoon et al., 2001), celiac disease (Djuric et al., 2007), and inflammatory bowel disease (Nowak et al., 2014). Pathological conditions are often associated with impaired mitochondrial bioenergetics (Nesci et al., 2021). Moreover, VK antagonists used in clinical therapy to prevent thromboembolism together with coadministration of other drugs can induce drug-drug interaction effects with VK malabsorption (Takada et al., 2015). Infants cannot obtain VK from the breast milk and have poor intestinal adsorption due to immature glut flora. Therefore, VK oral administration is the best way to prevent Vitamin K deficiency bleeding in infancy (Araki and Shirahata, 2020). It seems likely to postulate that an insufficient ATP production by enterocytes, related to a poor VK availability, also due to antibiotic treatments (Shirakawa et al., 1990), may represent, or contribute to, the biochemical bases of some gut pathologies.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2022 12:18AM by Panchito.