Can You Take K2 When You Are on a Blood Thinner?

Dr Paul Anderson
Dr Paul Anderson

How can I get around the problem of taking K2 when I'm on a blood thinner? The blood thinner you're mentioning there is a Factor 10A  anticoagulant. If you've been into any long COVID Clinic you probably come out with a Factor 10A drug like that one.  There’s so much vitamin K in our diet and everything else affects  Factors 2, 7, 9 and 10, which are mostly the extrinsic pathway, but Factor 10 is the common meeting place of the intrinsic,extrinsic pathway and what's important is if we are blocking all the vitamin K receptor sites we block all of those and we anticoagulate you.  

With warfarin or known as Coumadin in the US you also get a lot of bleeding problems and so the way we antidote warfarin overdose is we give you vitamin K.  Then there is a bleed over into the world of well don't take this with this Factor 10A drug, but the benefit of these real expensive Factor 10A drugs is simply that they don't work at two, seven and nine.  They work at 10A only not 10B or other moieties.  

What we see is if you are taking say a vitamin D and then a K2 the amount of K2 that's going to be in there is, let's say a 5,000 International unit vitamin D there might be 75 to 90 ish micrograms of K2.  That's actually completely safe with a Factor 10A drug like the one that you're taking.  Most of the Factor 10A drugs have an X somewhere in their name for the 10A parts.  If it's balanced with vitamin D and it's under 100 micrograms of K2 that's really not going to be an issue.