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Andrew's Progress Log
BLOOD TEST RESULTS - Serum Retinol Test - August 2023
2.49 umol/L (71 ug/dL)
Around the middle of the range. Obviously, not really an indication of what is being stored in the liver. But certainly shows that I am not "deficient". Not sure if anyone has thoughts?
Uploaded files:
Thanks @jiri for your help - but I'd still sleep easier knowing that it (hemochromatosis) wasn't hereditary and doomed to ever-increase. Not sure if it can be inferred from blood tests, or if a genetic test is required.
Ferritin - 383Â ug/L
Iron Serum - 19 umol/L
TSAT - 42%
TIBC - 44.1 umol/L
Definitely seems like donating blood would be a good idea. But I have no idea how much, how often etc. etc. I'll have to look into it.
Uploaded files:
That would mean I would have to donate 5-10 times ... that's a lot.
Not sure where I could even do that, and what the time scale should be. I don't even know if my country will allow people to donate more than once every 2-3 months.
Quote from Andrew W on August 14, 2023, 9:40 amThat would mean I would have to donate 5-10 times ... that's a lot.
Not sure where I could even do that, and what the time scale should be. I don't even know if my country will allow people to donate more than once every 2-3 months.
Just go and donate ASAP Andrew, thats what I did when my ferritin was 180. I went straight to donate blood and since then I have donated about 10 times. I donate every time I am allowed to, as a woman 4 times / year. I love it, its always fun and I feel good after. I love my red meat and eat more than a pound every day, so thats why I continue donating as long as it makes me feel good. Its for free, and it saves someones life too 🙂 and.. its fun 🙂
Quote from Andrew W on August 14, 2023, 9:40 amThat would mean I would have to donate 5-10 times ... that's a lot.
Not sure where I could even do that, and what the time scale should be. I don't even know if my country will allow people to donate more than once every 2-3 months.
It's not like you have to drop your ferritin by 200 points within 10 days or you die.. 🙂 Just start donating blood 3 times a year and maybe don't eat that much red meat. I also don't eat much red meat due to iron content.. I just eat some turkey/chicken and take some zinc with it..
Quote from David on July 20, 2023, 11:47 amIf you are interested, this is what I wrote in 2021 on the subject of estimating liver accumulation of vitamin A with a screenshot from a spreadsheet I made of it:
"Hi!
I looked a bit about the amount of vitamin A in the liver, since the liver is seen to store most of the vitamin A in the body. The liver amount is the focus of these calculation since the liver has been studied quite a bit in term of vitamin A storage with liver biopsies of dead people (of all causes). Any whole body estimation will mostly be a guess which probably differs a lot from person to person. There is even more vitamin A (in different forms) also stored outside the liver. I haven't looked for any study measuring vitamin A (in all forms) and how it is stored in the rest of the body.
The calculation unit used is Retinol Equivalent (RE) because older studies are used. Retinol Equivalent (RE) is almost the same as Retinol Activity Equivalents (RAE) but it scales down the effect of carotenoids by twice as much as RE. Since the liver mostly contains retinyl esters both RE and RAE gives the same results in terms of amount of vitamin A storage in the liver.
An average male liver is here assumed to weigh 1450 g and an average female liver to weigh 1300 g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK421/
The liver concentrations of vitamin A is taken from this 2018 report:
"Serum retinyl esters are positively correlated with analyzed total liver vitamin A reserves collected from US adults at time of death"
https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqy190It has four interval listed in (µmol of vitamin A as retinol equivalent=RE) per gram of liver tissue:
Deficiency: <0.1 μmol RE/g of liver
Optimal: 0.1-0.7 µmol RE/g of liver
High: 0.7-1.0 µmol RE/g of liver
Toxicity: >1.0 µmol RE/g of liverI use the retinol's molar mass of 286.45 g/mol to convert the given retinol equivalent values given in the 2018 study above to µg/g instead of µmol/g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinol
To put the calculated vitamin A liver amounts (retinol equivalents) in perspective I used "Estimated Average Requirement" (EAR) for vitamin A from the USDA report called "Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs): Estimated Average Requirements for Groups" from ~2005 (in RAE), https://www.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fnic_uploads/recommended_intakes_individuals.pdf (broken link) and the USA RDA for vitamin A (in RAE) from 2020, https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminA-HealthProfessional/. I then divided the amount of liver stored vitamin A (RE/RAE) for different daily amount of vitamin A given by the EAR (~2005) and by the RDA (2020). This gave an estimation of how many days of vitamin A (retinol activity equivalent) that is stored in the liver for different stages of vitamin A toxicity if the EAR or the RDA was an individual vitamin A excretion rate per day.
Since there are difference between adult females and adult males I calculated values for both of these. The amount of RDA stored in a toxic hypervitaminosis A liver (286.5 µg/g of liver) or even worse (572.9 µg/g of liver) confirms what Dr. Smith says about "It is a marathon and not a sprint".
In comparing the liver concentration of borderline hypervitaminosis A (286.5 µg/g of liver) to what might be the highest recorded liver concentration of vitamin A, 3131 µg/g (10438 IU/g of liver) from a 1962 New Zealand study. Thank you Dr. Smith for finding this 1962 study!
"Vitamin A content of human liver from autopsies in New Zealand" from 1962 by Barbara M. Smith and Eileen M. Malthus of the Nutrition Research Department, Medical Research Council of New Zealand, University of Otago Medical School, Dunedin, New Zealand. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/05E995B9E0FDDD52191FAB96494ABBDA/S0007114562000227a.pdf/vitamin-a-content-of-human-liver-from-autopsies-in-new-zealand.pdf
The record liver concentration came from 21 year old male who had been daily poisoned with 15000 µg (50 000 IU) of vitamin A supplementation at the hospital (where he was because of an unsuccessful suicide attempt, by drinking caustic soda). The study doesn't say how long the 21 year old was on this additional high dose vitamin A supplementation before it killed him. The same study notes that in rat experiments (earlier than 1962) they had seen livers with a concentration of 3000 µg/g of liver (10000 IU/g of liver). That seems to be the highest concentration of vitamin A that a rat liver and possibly a human liver can store right before dying.
I included this record liver concentration of vitamin A in the table as I see it as some sort of a maximum value, a roof of how high the liver concentrations can reach. Most of us here probably has a liver concentration of vitamin A somewhere between the extreme case and the hypervitaminosis A liver concentration."
End comment: I thought that 20 years to get rid of vitamin A looked unreasonable at the time but for some delicate and heavily damaged tissues that might be the time frame without any special intervension other than stopping a high dose vitamin A supplement. See this previous thread with a study on how eyes was seriously damaged by an extreme form of carotenoid supplementation and still leaves vague marks 20 years after stopping the supplement. See for yourself the picture from the study in this thread:
Just makes me wonder about my liver levels upon starting. I was serum-wise clearly in the hypervitaminosis A area with over normal serum and elevated liver enzymes. I was eating about 135.000IU (through food) for years. NO wonder I still get orangy spots after almost 5 years of going low.
@jiri - no, but dropping ferritin by 200 in 6 months would be desirable. And I'd still be at 150 even then.
@Inger - I'm not worried about giving blood 🙂 my point was that if I can only drop it by 50 points per donation (maximum!), then I'd have to make 5-6 donations just to get down to 100. If my country will only allow a blood draw every 3 months then that is over a full year. But add to this that my ferritin might be rising anyway, and all of a sudden it's 2 years of regular donations to even get close to being below 100. I was wondering if there was a more practical way to do it, or if certain considerations could be made.
Also, I have no evidence of this, but I don't think it is good to lose blood often. Creating blood can be very taxing for the body, and can cause additional stresses and aging. Almost like semen retention being good for vitality, I think blood retention is important. Although in my case, probably giving blood would be better than not doing it.
@Henrik - sorry to hear that. That's a lot of vA to detox from. I hope things are getting better now...
I really would like to understand how one can tell the difference between standard iron overload from too much iron consumption, low thyroid etc. vs. genetic / hereditary hemochromatosis... that would put my mind at a bit more ease.
SIX (and a half) WEEK UPDATE
No benefits so far, except for one thing:
Age 19-23 or so, I had extremely bad obsessive compulsive disorder. When I quit grains around age 23-24 (I went 'paleo'), I managed to bring my OCD under control significantly - to the point where it was c. 90-95% cured. This was awesome, and very freeing. However, a fragment still remains (remained) to this day.
Now at age 32, when I leave my front door, I often cannot convince myself that it is locked, and have to stand at the door checking, re-checking, and re-checking, and have my own breathing / counting ritual when doing so, before I can walk away. I cannot leave the front door until I am sure that it is locked. However, this only takes about 30 seconds. So ultimately, it takes maximum a couple of minutes out of my day - which is way better compared to the 4 hours of rituals in my early 20s.
However, since starting this diet 6 weeks ago: I now no longer find myself checking / re-checking to see that it is locked. I lock the door, give the handle one push, then walk away. For all intents and purposes, my OCD is completely cured. From 100% strength at age 19-23, to a more manageable 5-10% strength age 24-32, to virtually 0% after a little over a month on this vA restrictive diet.
Not sure if this is interesting @ggenereux2014 ?
I'll give it a bit more time with the OCD just to be sure, it could return. But this is certainly very irregular for me. I was disappointed to see my thyroid autoimmunity blood tests significantly higher than my result back in Jan 2023 (c. 50% higher - see post #27) but there could have been something else going on in that 6 months prior to starting the diet on July 1st 2023).
I've taken the photos that I've mentioned, all except the evidence of vitiligo - it is quite hard to see on my skin because I am quite fair-skinned anyway, so I was thinking of standing under a dark light for people to see it better. I'll figure out how to do this - it certainly isn't going to go away in a hurry 🙂
I'll post the before photos in the next post.
@andrew2 " no, but dropping ferritin by 200 in 6 months would be desirable. And I'd still be at 150 even then."
So what? It is not some extreme number. So it is not emergency case.. Don't stress about that. Just donate blood when you can and don't eat red meat daily..