Supplements Now Account for One in Five Liver Injuries in…

Supplements Now Account for One in Five Liver Injuries in the US The wellness routines of millions begin the same way: a multivitamin, a protein shake, perhaps a herbal sleep aid or a turmeric capsule, all taken before breakfast with little thought given to interactions or cumulative dose. New data analysed through the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, supported by the NIH and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, suggests this routine carries more risk than most patients, or even many clinicians, fully appreciate. Herbal and dietary supplements now account for approximately 20% of drug-induced liver injuries in the United States. This figure has grown alongside the wellness and supplement industry's rapid expansion, and it reflects a category of liver injury that is often harder to diagnose and treat than injury from conventional pharmaceuticals. Several factors compound the difficulty. Supplement labelling is frequently inaccurate or incomplete. Patients commonly do not disclose supplement use to their treating physicians, often because they do not consider supplements to be "real" medications worth mentioning. And unlike many drug-induced liver injuries, there are typically no specific antidotes once injury has occurred. Three categories of supplements recur most frequently as triggers in the data: anabolic steroid-containing bodybuilding products, concentrated green tea extract supplements, and multi-ingredient nutritional supplements. Multi-ingredient products present a particular diagnostic challenge. When a product combines numerous herbs, vitamins, stimulants and proprietary