VITAMIN A OVERDOSE
Of late, vitamin A has been much in the news as a drug that reduces the incidence of certain cancers. Accordingly, for the sake of fair balance, we felt that our readers should be told about a recent report in the Western Journal of Medicine (137:429).
A young woman visited her doctor because dryness of the eyes made it uncomfortable for her to wear her contacts. She also complained of a sore tongue and gums, cracking of the skin at the corners of the mouth, and generalized itching and dryness of the skin. She also had a continuous headache, felt nauseated, and had frequently vomited during the previous seven days. Devoted to jogging, she nevertheless had had to give it up because of severe pains in her bones.
On being questioned in the hospital, this lady (a health food store employee) admitted taking 25,000 units of vitamin A daily (five times the “recommended daily allowance”) for several months. Tests showed abnormally high vitamin A blood levels that, among other things, had disturbed her liver. All of these signs and symptoms were typical of toxicity due to excess of vitamin A.
Treatment with intravenous fluids normalized this woman’ s blood levels of vitamin A in about a week. Had she taken vitamin A in excess for much longer, however, early death from liver failure would have become inevitable. The lesson, then, is to take only enough vitamin A to avoid deficiency and bolster resistance against cancer, the recommended daily allowance (RDA), but do not take it in excess.
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