The discovery was a result of investigations into the cause of an excessive bleeding disorder in chickens fed on a fat free diet. The study was carried out on the possible essentiality of cholesterol in the diet of the chicken during the years of 1928-1930 in the Biochemical Institute of the University of Copenhagen.
Henrik Dam noted that the chicks exposed to food that had been extracted with non-polar solvents to remove sterols, developed subdural and muscular hemorrhages and that blood taken from these animal clotted slowly.
He concluded that a non-polar component responsible for hemorrhagic was remove from the diet by the extraction and focused his research on identifying this component.
In 1934, Henrik Dam reported the existence of the new accessory food factor and then went on to show in the following year that this was fat soluble but different from vitamin A, D or E.
He proposed that the anti-hemorrhagic factor was a new vitamin. He named it vitamin K for ‘koagulation’ according to the Scandinavia and German spelling.
The existence of vitamin K was promptly confirmed by Almquist and Stokstad at the University of California, Berkeley.
Beginning in the early 1960s, studies of prothrombin production in humans and experimental animals eventually led to an understanding of the metabolic role of vitamin K.
Discovery of vitamin K
