Vitamin K and Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

Vitamin K is revealing itself to be more than just a blood coagulant. Recent research has just come out about how it helps the the human body fight certain types of cancer. At the 101st Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), researchers at the Mayo Clinic campus in Minnesota reported that the risk of developing Non-Hodgkin lymphoma was approximately 45 percent lower for participants who took higher vitamin K amounts, compared to participants who took less. This observation proved consistent even after accounting for other factors such as obesity, smoking, age, sex, education, alcohol use and even intake of foods with high amounts of antioxidants. Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma is a type of immune system cancer and is the most common hematologic malignancy in the United States. Vitamin K acts to inhibit inflammatory cytokines which are thought to lead to Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Until now, vitamin k has been seen primarily as the key factor in inducing blood clotting and not much more. “These results are provocative, since they are the first work we have done on the connection between vitamin K and Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and this is a fairly strong protective effect,” explained the study’s lead author, James Cerhan, M.D., Ph.D., a cancer epidemiologist. “However, as with all new findings, this will need to be replicated in other studies.”