Education
 

Vitamin poisoning

From Psychology Wiki

Community portal · Tasks to do · News · Help

Clinical · Educational · Ind&Org · Other fields · Professional · Transpersonal · World

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language
Personality | Philosophy | Research Methods | Social | Statistics

Biological: Behavioural genetics · Evolutionary psychology · Neuroanatomy · Neurochemistry · Neuroendocrinology · Psychoneuroimmunology · Physiological Psychology · Psychopharmacology


hypervitaminosis
ICD-10 E670-E673
ICD-9 278.2, 278.4
OMIM [1]
DiseasesDB [2]
MedlinePlus [3]
eMedicine /
MeSH {{{MeshNumber}}}

Vitamin poisoning, hypervitaminosis or vitamin overdose refers to a condition of high storage levels of vitamins, which can lead to toxic symptoms. The medical names of the different conditions are derived from the vitamin involved: an excess of vitamin A, for example, is called "hypervitaminosis A."

With few exceptions, like some vitamins from B complex, hypervitaminosis usually occurs more with fat-soluble vitamins, which remain more time in the body and are harder to be excreted than water soluble vitamins.

High dosage vitamin A; high dosage, slow release vitamin B3; and very high dosage vitamin B6 alone (i.e. without vitamin B complex) are sometimes associated with vitamin side effects that usually rapidly cease with supplement reduction or cessation.

Vitamin C has a brief, pronounced laxative effect when taken in large amounts, typically in the range of 5-20 grams per day in divided doses for a person in normal "good health," although seriously ill people,[1] may take 100-200 grams without inducing vitamin poisoning.

High doses of mineral supplements can also lead to side effects and toxicity. Mineral-supplement poisoning does occur occasionally due to excessive and unusual intake of iron-containing supplements, including some multivitamins, but is not common.

The Dietary Reference Intake recommendations from the United States Department of Agriculture define a "tolerable upper intake level" for most vitamins.

[edit] Comparative safety statistics

Death by vitamin poisoning appears to be quite uncommon in the US, typically none in a given year. Before 1998, several deaths per year were associated with pharmaceutical iron-containing supplements, especially brightly-colored, sugar-coated, high-potency iron supplements, and most deaths were children.[2] Unit packaging restrictions on supplements with more than 30 mg of iron have since reduced deaths to 0 or 1 per year.[2] These statistics compare with 59 deaths due to aspirin poisoning in 2003 [3] and 147 deaths associated with acetaminophen-containing products in 2003.[3]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. Vitamin C, Titrating To Bowel Tolerance, Anascorbemia, And Acute Induced Scurvy Robert F. Cathcart, III, M.D. 1994
  2. 2.0 2.1 Tenenbein M (2005). Unit-dose packaging of iron supplements and reduction of iron poisoning in young children. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 159 (6): 557–60.
  3. 3.0 3.1 Watson WA, Litovitz TL, Klein-Schwartz W, et al (2004). 2003 annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers Toxic Exposure Surveillance System. Am J Emerg Med 22 (5): 335–404.




Smallwikipedialogo.png This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Vitamin poisoning. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.